I heard a guy interviewed on the radio the other day, some folk musician from the 60s, he described the first time he ever saw a photograph of the Earth taken from space.
Being born after the Space Race, after all the manned missions to the moon, photos of the Earth from space had always been available to me. I just took it for granted and it never really dawned on me just how very recent it is that we’ve had such photos.
I’ve just come to the realization that people not very much older than me had gone through a significant portion of their lives having never seen a photo of the Earth from space and that, for many of those people, the experience of seeing that photo for the first time may have been pretty amazing.
Any Dopers care to recount what it was like to first see a photo of the Earth from space??? Had the experience been dulled by having previously seen artists’ renderings of what the image would look like? Was there awe in your experience, or just a “meh”?
The initial shots from the first manned partial and then full orbits rivited everyone. When you could see the earth out of a window it was so vivid, like recalling your own airplane rides.
Definite awe (in the original sense of the word, not just “duuuuuuuuuude, that’s soooooo awwwwwwwwesome!”)
I recall some combination of “wow” and “oh my god” the first dozen (at least) times I saw such a shot – needing to stop and stare at the image a good long time.
OK, I don’t know if this could have been an actual picture, or an artist’s rendering, probably the latter. It was 1950 in a movie called “Destination Moon”. I was 11 and I used to attend saturday matinee in our small town, a double feature for about 25-35 cents. I don’t remember much of the film, but I do remember the entire screen being filled w/ a picture of the Earth and that it looked very real. The film was very popular at the time, although this Wiki article kind of pans it.
I don’t remember the first time I saw a picture of Earth taken from space. I’m sure I was aware of it at the time - I followed the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions, and the less-remembered Ranger and Surveyor missions, quite closely at the time.
What I do still vividly remember seeing were the first close-up photos of the Moon, taken by the unmanned Ranger 7 probe just before it (intentionally) crashed into the lunar surface on July 31, 1964. They broadcast the pictures on TV one morning shortly after - maybe even the same morning the photos were taken, I don’t know for sure - and for some odd reason, I was watching. No big deal now, but it was a definite ‘WOW’ then.
Ditto the WOW of watching the Ranger photos before that thing slammed into the Moon. You could get some idea of how incredibly fast it was going.
And WOW when John Glenn survived his journey.
And WOW with the first Earth photos.
And WOW sitting with the family watching the moon landing, watching Neil Armstrong’s foot hit the moon.
And the almost impossible to make out Venera pictures of the surface of Venus.
And even the National Geographic that came out with the simple title MARS and a picture of the rocky surface. I kept that issue, reasoning that it would be an amazing antique some day. But antique National Geographics are still so common, they must still be printing them…
I don’t remember much from the earlier Gemini or Apollo missions. But the one that I do recall sticking in my memory is the “earthrise” shot from Apollo 8. I remember this being on a lot of magazine covers (remember this is pre-internet, and you had to look at magazines to see such shots ;-), and I also recall it being on the Whole Earth Catalog.
Up until such shots, you were kind of used to what was shown in sci-fi movies and TV. What struck me about the first real shots were…all the clouds. Even in “Star Trek”, whenever they showed the earth from space, it was cloudless skies all around ! I was always expecting the Universal-like earth where you could make out all the continents. But all the clouds made that kind of tough.
Earthrise was a very popular poster in many college dorm rooms in the early 1970s.
Photos from space = Tuesdays.
Before you say WFT?
Tuesday was the day that Life magazine came out, and they had some of the most awesome pictures ever of the whatever was the latest in the space race. Large format and color pictures.
Pre-internet pre a whole lot of other stuff, Life magazine rocked.
The very first time I saw the earth from orbit was in the '60s. Unfortunately, it was on a very small, black & white TV and lost a lot of impact.
The viewing that sticks in my mind the most was one of the later Apollo missions in the early '70s. The thing that made it memorable was that I was sitting on a sofa with a very old man. He was 101 years old then. His amazement made me think about just what it was we were seeing.
