Deserving of our love...

[gateley]

[classof56]

1. What an incredible image!

Deserving of our love and tender care. Her future is in our hands!

[SaveAmerica]

2. Happy Earth day!! Heading out to plant some trees for future tree hugging..

[AspenRose]

3. Beautiful big blue marble.

eom

[grantcart]

4. Nice shot - did you take it?

[gateley]

12. ...

:)

[Seabiscuit]

5. Beautiful!

[Shine]

6. Not just today, but EVERY day.

:thumbsup:

It's fascinating to think about how this beautiful image of the earth in space awakened a movement in the collective consciousness.

[roguevalley]

7. our beautiful mother. I love her.

[redqueen]

8. .

[cliffordu]

9. Nice, Thanks!!!

[Straight Shooter]

10. Deserving of our respect, as well.

:thumbsup:

[myrna minx]

11. K&R

Photos of the Earth have available for my whole life, and it still is awe inspiring for me to see, but I can't imagine what is was like for people to see the images for the first time.


View of Earth from a camera on V-2 #13, launched October 24, 1946.
(White Sands Missile Range/Applied Physics Laboratory)

http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/FEATURE-FirstPhoto.html?c=y&page=1

The First Photo From Space
In 1946, rocket-borne cameras gave us our first look at Earth from beyond the atmosphere.

By Tony Reichhardt
Air & Space Magazine, November 01, 2006

On October 24, 1946, not long after the end of World War II and years before the Sputnik satellite opened the space age, a group of soldiers and scientists in the New Mexico desert saw something new and wonderful—the first pictures of Earth as seen from space.

The grainy, black-and-white photos were taken from an altitude of 65 miles by a 35-millimeter motion picture camera riding on a V-2 missile launched from the White Sands Missile Range. Snapping a new frame every second and a half, the rocket-borne camera climbed straight up, then fell back to Earth minutes later, slamming into the ground at 500 feet per second. The camera itself was smashed, but the film, protected in a steel cassette, was unharmed.

Fred Rulli was a 19-year-old enlisted man assigned to the recovery team that drove into the desert to retrieve film from those early V-2 shots. When the scientists found the cassette in good shape, he recalls, "They were ecstatic, they were jumping up and down like kids." Later, back at the launch site, "when they first projected onto the screen, the scientists just went nuts."

Before 1946, the highest pictures ever taken of the Earth’s surface were from the Explorer II balloon, which had ascended 13.7 miles in 1935, high enough to discern the curvature of the Earth. The V-2 cameras reached more than five times that altitude, where they clearly showed the planet set against the blackness of space. When the movie frames were stitched together, the panoramas covered a million square miles or more at a single glance. As Clyde Holliday, the engineer who developed the camera, wrote in National Geographic in 1950, the V-2 photos showed for the first time "how our Earth would look to visitors from another planet coming in on a space ship."