APOD: 2022 February 27 - Earthrise 1: Historic Image Remastered

Good morning, Rallypoint, and welcome to the February 27th Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD): "Earthrise." The following extract from the Apollo 8 flight logs (mission elapsed time is given in hours:minutes:seconds) seemed a fitting caption for this remastered image:

"It is ... Christmas Eve [1968] and Apollo 8 has completed three full orbits of the Moon. Its crew of Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders are well into the thick of their tasks. Prime among these is to extensively photograph the ground passing beneath the spacecraft and to visually appraise the approaches to two possible landing sites on the southern plains of Mare Tranquillitatis.

Around the far side, as they began flying over the sunlit half of the Moon, Bill began to take a long series of stereo photographs of the surface, as per the Flight Plan, using magazine D on a Hasselblad camera mounted in one of the forward-facing rendezvous windows. The camera is fitted with an 80-mm lens and controlled by an intervalometer that takes frames at preset intervals, in this case every 20 seconds.

While the intervalometer operates one camera, Bill has been using another Hasselblad with a 250-mm lens to take photographs of so-called "targets of opportunity" on magazine E loaded with black & white film. Meanwhile, Frank flies the spacecraft and currently has it pointed vertically down so that the mounted camera gets a view of the ground below through window 2, one of the two rendezvous windows and the only two that are fully clear.

075:46:06 Lovell (onboard): What time are you supposed to be pitching up?
075:46:09 Anders (onboard): I don't pitch up until [garble].
075:46:10 Lovell (onboard): Okay.
075:46:27 Borman (onboard): Alright, we're going to roll.
075:46:33 Borman (onboard): Ready? Set.

Frank's rotation of the spacecraft is bringing Bill's window, window 5 around to face their direction of travel. Meanwhile, Bill is using the DSE voice recorder as a log of his work.

075:46:47 Anders (onboard): The impact crater was at - just prior to subsolar point on the south side, in the floor of it, [garble] - There is one dark hole, and I couldn't get a quick enough look at it to see if it might be anything volcanic.

At this point, Bill looks out of window 5 and catches sight of a beautiful, coloured orb coming over the Moon's western horizon. The event becomes historic and the result is one of the most famous photographs to emerge from the Apollo program; the Apollo 8 Earthrise image.

075:47:30 Anders (onboard): Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there! Here's the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!
075:47:37 Borman (onboard): Hey, don't take that, it's not scheduled. (Chuckle.)"

I'm glad there was a small deviation from the flight plan.