4.1 Apollo 8
Apollo 8 is of obvious significance because the astronauts on board became the first people to see the far side of the moon, and the first to witness an Earthrise: the apparent rising of the Earth from below the Moon's horizon as the orbiting spacecraft reached Mare Smythii in its passage around the Moon. This phenomenon had, of course, already been witnessed by Soviet and US unmanned probes, but to be captured by human eyes added much more pathos to the event.
The mission was launched on 21/12/68, reached lunar orbit on 24/12/68, and re-entered the Earth's atmosphere on 27/12/68. During that mission, 865 images were taken on 7 film magazines. The majority of the images were used as source material for preparing future landing sites, but images of Earth are found on magazines 12-16. A number of TV broadcasts were also made, and images will also be examined from those broadcasts.
Each image will be given in its original form, then compared with satellite images from the same day. The importance of the original image is mostly to demonstrate how small the Earth is in those images, despite their ability to reveal tremendous amounts of detail.
ESSA 7 images are available this document. I actually own a hard copy of this and confirm that the online scan is absolutely accurate. ATS-3 and ATS-1 images for at least some of the mission can be found in here. This document has ESSA-7 images covering the north Atlantic throughout the mission and these are added where possible. We’ll also be making good use of the digitally restored ESSA data (see Chapter 2.4) to produce 3D versions of the data.
The full transcript of the mission can be found here. The mission timeline is here.
The final section will look at the meteorological data available, to see how the photographic record compares with ground based measurements of the weather at the time.