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The Blue Marbel





from The Atlantic


It's an iconic image we have all seen hundreds of times, possibly thousands, and probably the most widely reproduced photograph in history. Because it's in the public domain it has been used for everything from car commercials to the Earth Day flag, printed on T-shirts, postage stamps, billboards, book covers, mouse pads -- most any surface you can print on. It even has its own Facebook page. In the NASA archive its formal designation is AS17-148-22727 but it's commonly known as The Blue Marble Shot.


It was the first photograph taken of the whole round Earth and the only one ever snapped by a human being. You can't see the Earth as a globe unless you get at least twenty thousand miles away from it, and only 24 humans ever went that far into outer space. They were the three-man crews of the nine Apollo missions that traveled to the moon between 1968 and 1972, six of which landed there successfully (three men went twice). But only the last three saw a full Earth.