In 1968, astronaut William Anders captured a beautiful photo of an Earth rise behind the moon’s surface. But did you know that there is actually no such thing as an Earth Emergence?
Apollo 8 astronauts Anders, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell were originally going to make a test flight in orbit. However, it was rumored that the Soviet Union would launch a mission to the moon before the Americans, so the US space agency decided to throw the Apollo 8 astronauts in the deep end and put them into orbit around the moon. This flight was carried out more than six months before the first moon landing. During the Apollo 8 mission, the astronauts looked for possible landing sites for future missions.
On December 24, 1968 at 5 PM Dutch time, the astronauts suddenly saw the Earth appear behind the lunar surface. Astronaut Anders is the first to respond: “Oh my God. Look at that image. The earth rises. Wow, that’s beautiful.” Borman jokes that no photo is allowed: “That is not on our program.” Anders asks Lovell if he can have a roll of film for the camera and takes a picture with a modified Hasselblad 500 EL camera.
NASA made the reconstruction below of this special moment.
Photo rotated
The original photo has been rotated 95 degrees so that the moon’s surface is not visible on the right, but at the bottom. This makes it seem as if the earth is rising above the horizon. The tilt caused our planet to rotate 135 degrees from its normal north-south position. Antarctica can be seen at the top left.
The original Earthrise photo.
Emergence does not exist
Did you know that it is not possible to observe an earth rise on the surface of the moon in real life? The astronauts saw Earth rise from behind the lunar surface as the spacecraft orbited the natural satellite. This is not possible on the moon. The moon always faces the Earth with the same side. We call this a synchronous rotation. The rotation of the moon on its axis takes as long as one complete orbit around the earth. Therefore, the moon always looks the same from Earth. Suppose you were to walk on the moon, then you would either always see the Earth (on the ‘front’) or never see it (on the ‘back’).
However, we have to add a small caveat here. At the border of the ‘front’ and ‘back’ of the moon there is an earth rise – which lasts very slowly – because the moon oscillates slightly.
Earthrise 2.0
In 2015, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter created a 2.0 version of the famous Apollo 8 photo. The photo was taken when the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter flew 134 kilometers above the crater Compton. It turned out to be quite a challenge to take this snapshot. The spacecraft first had to tilt 67 degrees and then turn in the direction of flight. This allowed the widest possible lunar horizon to be captured with the spacecraft’s narrow-angle camera. Meanwhile, the LRO was moving 1,600 meters per second faster than the lunar surface.
