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Concept
The Blue Marble
Summary
The Blue Marble is a photograph of Earth taken on December 7, 1972, from a distance of around from the planet's surface. Taken by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft on its way to the Moon, it is one of the most reproduced images in history.
It mainly shows Earth from the Mediterranean Sea to Antarctica. This was the first time the Apollo trajectory made it possible to photograph the south polar ice cap, despite the Southern Hemisphere being heavily covered in clouds. In addition to the Arabian Peninsula and Madagascar, almost the entire coastline of Africa and most of the Indian Ocean are clearly visible, a cyclone in the Indian Ocean is also visible, the South Asian mainland is on the eastern limb.
NASA has also applied the name to a 2012 series of images which cover the entire globe at relatively high resolution. These were created by looking through taken over time in order to find as many cloudless photographs as possible to use in the final images. NASA has verified all images of the 2012 "blue marble" are composites as they cannot get far enough away and have to combine multiple photos together. Likewise, these images do not fit together properly and due to lighting, weather and cloud interference it is impossible to collect cohesive or fully clear images to begin with.
The photograph, taken on December 7, 1972, is one of the most widely distributed photographic images in existence. The astronauts had the Sun above them when they took the image. To the astronauts, the slightly gibbous Earth had the appearance and size of a glass marble, hence the name.
The Blue Marble was not the , since such images by satellites had already been made and released as early as 1967, and is the second time such a photo was taken by a person after the 1968 photograph Earthrise taken by William Anders of Apollo 8.
Before the Blue Marble a picture of the fully illuminated Earth by the ATS-3 satellite was used in 1968 by Stewart Brand for his Whole Earth Catalog, after campaigning since 1966 to have NASA release a then-rumored satellite image of the entire Earth as seen from space.
Official source
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