Pictures are amazing things – they predate writing and indeed writing can be seen as coded pictures. People have been drawing the moon for a long long time, they have created maps and stories and even made the moon a character themselves on those stories.
We are fortunate that the moon landings where recorded via photos, photos that themselves have inspired new stories be those stories scientific or flights of fantasy and they are certainly an interesting debate point.
And though as a geologist – especially one who loves impact craters – the moon surface is fascinating in all it’s pox marked glory – the image that really really hit humanity between they eyes was taken just before the landings on an earlier mission.
By NASA/Bill Anders – This is a retouched picture, which means that it has been digitally altered from its original version. Modifications: rotation, cropping, level adjustment, dirt removal. Modifications made by Earthsound. The original can be found here., Public Domain, Link
This image more than any other throughout the history of humanity has allowed ourselves to see who we are for the first time. There we are hanging there in space, in all that void, in that dark nothing, a little oasis of life as seen from a rocky desolate world, a world far more normal than our own. And we are all there – together – part of it and intricately interlaced into it’s systems, we are it and we rely on it.
It is US.
The image was taken by the Apollo 8 crew and is a view that very few people have ever actually witness and yet through the medium of photography we have all seen it!
