The Apollo 8 mission in 1968, the first time humans had orbited the Moon, is most famous for producing the Earthrise photo credited with kick-starting environmental activism. People are speculating about whether the Artemis II lunar mission will deliver images with equal impact.
Earthrise was taken by Bill Anders as the spacecraft flew over the far side of the Moon, the first time it had been seen with human eyes. People are entranced by the rising blue Earth, half in shadow, and the image has been analysed and written about countless times. Of course we have to remember that the photograph does not necessarily show the colours that human eyes saw. Nevertheless, the image painted Earth as beautiful, while the Moon was ugly.
The eye is drawn to the blue and white Earth. It seems a fragile sphere of light and life, contrasted with the hard, rocky monochrome surface of the Moon. But what about this surface underneath? This is what I want to explore in this post.
Under Old Earth
If we draw our gaze away from Earth and down to the Moon, what do we see?
The surface is sort of a mild beige colour with white highlights. It's not smooth, but gently undulating. This is because the photo was taken at sub-solar point, so there's no shadows, like midday on Earth. When the sun is high, the Moon tends to take on browner hues. The craters visible at other times of day aren't so prominent: we depend on the shadows to see depth and elevation.
The main geological formation is Pasteur crater, which is 233 km in diameter. Crater Pasteur T, 40 km in diameter, is a 'satellite crater' located on the west side of Pasteur. The satellite craters were created by later impacts. There's at least 14 which have a letter designation. Apollo 8 passed over many of them.
Pasteur T was renamed 'Anders' Earthrise' on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission in 2018. Ganskiy M crater, 12.5 km in diameter. was renamed 'Homeward 8'. It was at this point that the spacecraft fired its engines to begin the return journey to Earth.
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| The Earthrise landscape with the renamed craters. Credit: NASA/IAU |
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| The Earthrise landscape, flat. Credit: NASA/IAU |
On Apollo 8's first orbit, Bill Anders, Jim Lovell and Frank Bormann made their first observations of the Moon close-up with human eyes.
These days we see a lunar landscape and just assume that the round features we're looking at are impact craters, but this wasn't always the case. Before NASA's lunar exploration programme began in the 1960s, there was debate about whether the circular topography observed was created by volcanic events - inside the Moon - or impact events - from outside the Moon. By the time of Apollo 8, the meteorite theory was gaining ascendance. Bill Anders referred to this when he said 'Whew! Well, we answered it. They're meteorites, aren't they?' (069:15:17).
The astronauts' impressions of the lunar landscape are recorded in the transcript of their conversations with each other and mission control. I've accessed these through the incredible resource which is the Apollo Lunar Flight Journal.
Dirty beach sand
As the astronauts responded to the view on their first lunar encounter, Anders said, 'It looks like a big - looks like a big beach down there' (069:15:24). They were looking at the far side. A commentator on the Apollo 8 transcript said that the far side had a distinct appearance, compared to the near side:
Instead, this landscape is a beat-up mish-mash of overlapping large craters whose ancient forms have been smoothed by aeons of relentless sandblasting from space. Its rounded, undulating topography reminds Bill of a sandy beach which has seen the passage of many feet.
Lovell commented on how grey it was (069:18:08), and later he emphasised this again: "Okay, Houston. The Moon is essentially gray, no color; looks like plaster of Paris or sort of a grayish beach sand" (069:51:16). This became the dominant metaphor, and both Lovell and Anders mentioned it again on their second orbit as they were passing over the Pasteur region:
Lovell: "Say, Bill. How would you describe the color of the Moon from here?" (071:44:10). Anders: The color of the Moon looks, ah, a very whitish gray, like dirty beach sand, and with lots of footprints in it" (071:44:14).
Of course there were no footprints on the surface of the Moon yet, and if there were they wouldn't have been distinguishable at 70 km anyway. The Apollo 8 astronauts would've had no idea just how significant footprints in the regolith would become in lunar iconographies.
And this was a beach with no water. It had the appearance of a beach with none of the geological processes which created one.
I wondered if there was any particular dirty beach that Anders had in mind. In an interview done with Ron Judd when he was 79, Anders recalled 'a California beach where he used to sneak off with Valerie', his wife, as his inspiration. This might refer to his period at Hamilton Air Force Base in 1956, when he and Valerie were either not yet married, or newly married, which might account for the sneaking off. The base was located on San Pablo Bay, which is a tidal estuary; so the beaches were not on the open ocean - they were where the rivers gave out to the sea. By 'dirty beach sand', Anders may have meant the tidal beaches along the edges of the bay, grey river silt.
I haven't been able to find any good images of the area in the 1950s to illustrate this, so it is a theory at the moment, but it's worth thinking about the metaphor of a grey silty river beach rather than polluted ocean sand. The comparison Anders is making is not that the Moon is a dirty beach compared to pristine yellow or white ocean beaches on Earth. The comparison is between a tidal riverine beach and an open ocean beach; so I think this is quite a different sort of metaphor. We might imagine the footprints, as Anders imagined the small craters overlying Pasteur T, as those of the young lovers as they walked along hand-in-hand.
And the orbits rolled by
When you see the Earthrise photo, the Moon is static and the unseen spacecraft is hanging frozen above it. The camera shutter has barely closed. Time has stopped. It's easy to forget how dynamic the moment was. The Apollo 8 astronauts saw the lunar surface in motion, at all points of the day and night, as shadows lengthened and shortened.
The Apollo 8 mission showed us Earthrise on the Moon, but perhaps equally significant is that it showed us sunrise and sunset on the Moon through human eyes. They took images of the terminator as it passed over crater Mechnikov, light and shadows turning to pure black as they whirled into lunar night. Nightfall on another planet! Such a mundane, daily experience on Earth, but here, strange and otherworldly.
They saw a rich and dynamic shadow landscape created by the depths and heights of craters and seas and mountains and rilles. Many of the craters had names, and they could correlate them with the maps that they had studied on Earth. They made a roll-call of craters as they flew over them. The static Earthrise photo contributes to the impression of a dead Moon because none of this movement is captured in it.
The colours and textures changed as they spun past, but the astronauts persisted in their interpretation of lifelessness and nothingness, which have come to dominate how people understand the Moon. Lovell said 'We don't know whether you can see it from the TV screen, but the Moon is nothing but a milky white. Completely void' (085:44:28).
During a live broadcast to Earth, Borman said 'What we'll do now is follow the trail that we've been following all day and take you on through to a lunar sunset. The Moon is a different thing to each one of us. I think that each one of - each one carries his own impression of what he's seen today. I know my own impression is that it's a vast, lonely, forbidding-type existence, or expanse of nothing, that looks rather like clouds and clouds of pumice stone...' (085:44:58).
Who else has seen this landscape?
Of course, Apollo 8 has not been our only view of this landscape. It existed before and it will exist after Earthrise .... it's dynamic, with the Earth in motion continuously. There are Earthrises and Earthsets every day.
The Soviet orbiter Luna 3 sent back the first images of the far side in 1959. In 1961, the International Astronomical Union named a crater photographed by Luna 3 'Pasteur', but it was not well defined.
The first US lunar orbiters, Lunar Orbiter 1 and Lunar Orbiter 2, launched in 1966, got coverage of nearly the whole Moon. LO1 took the first robotic photograph of an Earthrise, but it was in black and white. LO2 photographed Pasteur crater from 1, 790 km.
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| Pasteur crater taken by Lunar Orbiter 2. Credit: James Stuby based on NASA image |
The Soviet Zond 5 and 6 spacecraft flew round the Moon in September and November 1968, and seem to have taken photographs. But the region was still vaguely defined by the time Apollo 8 went past. The crew's unofficial name for Pasteur was Borman. After the mission, Apollo 8 data was used by the IAU to firm up names for landscape features and Pasteur became official.
Apollo 15 snapped the Earthrise landscape (I'm going to call it this from now on) from orbit in 1971. Apollo 17 photographed it in 1972, from an oblique angle. You can see the little craters that looked like footprints to Anders.
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Oblique view of Anders' Earthrise crater, facing west. Taken by Apollo 17 panoramic camera. Credit: James Stuby based on NASA image
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There have been other lunar orbiters too, like Clementine, which orbited briefly in 1994, and the Japanese Kaguya, launched to the Moon in 2007. Kaguya took many photos of Earthrise and Earthset but I'm not sure if any of them were over Pasteur. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched by NASA in 2009. It has mapped the Earthrise landscape during multiple passes, using the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) instrument.
If we went trawling through the archives we would no doubt find the Earthrise landscape in many different lights and moods, taken by different spacecraft at different distances from the lunar surface.
A Site of Special Scientific Interest?
In 2025, Working Group 1 of the Global Expert Group for Sustainable Lunar Activity (GEGSLA) proposed that Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) should be identified on the Moon. One of the categories was radio-quiet areas, which need to be protected so that radio astronomy can be carried out. The far side is ideal for this as it is shielded from the radio pollution coming from Earth. It's vital that areas of the far side are sequestered from radio interference created by future lunar satellites, industries and permanent bases - before it's too late.
The Earthrise landscape is potentially one of these areas. In 2024, ESA's JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) spacecraft flew past the Earthrise landscape and used it to test the Radar for Icy Moon Exploration (RIME) instrument. This instrument uses radar to measure the topology of rocky bodies. To get good results, RIME needs to measure precisely the differences in how radio waves bounce back from the surface - for example, from the rocks underlying Europa's oceans. It needed radio quiet, and the far side of the Moon was ideal to test this. All the other instruments were turned off for eight minutes so there was complete radio silence. The RIME instrument's results were assessed against LOLA's measurements to make sure it was working properly. It was so radio quiet that all they could hear was noise from one of the other instruments - which ESA then had to fix before the spacecraft continued its journey to the moons of Jupiter!
The combination of scientific utility and cultural associations gives the Earthrise landscape exceptional natural and cultural value. I'm not going to do a formal significance assessment in this post, but will note that multiple strands of significance converge on this place. Perhaps this makes the Earthrise landscape a good candidate for a Site of Special Scientific Interest.
The eyes of Artemis II
Bill Anders famously said 'We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.'
Above all, we are the generation to see through the eyes of the astronauts the astonishing ‘earthrise’ of our small and beautiful planet above the barren horizons of the moon. Indeed, we in this generation would be some kind of psychological monstrosity if this were not an age of intense, passionate, committed debate and search.
She saw Earthrise playing a role in the foundation of a 'moral community' that would enable a more equitable distribution of the planet’s wealth.
We've seen Earthrise now. We've seen many views of Earth from outside and many views of the lunar surface. Earthrise still has the power to astonish, but it has not led to the radical change in attitudes towards Earth's fragile environment that it heralded.
Apollo 8 orbited at about 100 km, while Artemis II, planned to launch from the US on April 1, 2026, will see the Moon from around 7, 600 km. It won't be a similar perspective. But, for the first time, it won't be a white American male gaze either. The 4-person crew includes a woman (Christina Koch), a Canadian (Jeremy Hansen), and a person of colour (Victor Glover). All of the crew, except Jeremy Hansen, have been in space before. They've seen Earth. Now, they'll see the Moon, with all the hindsight of the nearly 60 years of space activities since 1968, knowing that there are plans to mine its resources and build infrastructure to sustain more permanent human residence. They'll be taking photos - more details about the spacecraft's cameras are here - and talking about what they see. I don't know if or when we'll get that transcript. But I want to know what the crew say, what their emotional response will be.
What I'm looking for from Artemis II is a not a new Earth. It's a new revelation of the Moon - or at least the start of one.
I don't want to expect too much of the crew. They shouldn't have to have the burden of being profound as well as doing their jobs, but I am hopeful that they won't simply replicate the Apollo 8 mantra of the desolate, barren Moon. I'd like to see a vision of the Moon as part of the Earth system, not the almost adversarial relationship that Earthrise set up.
To my mind, there's another significant image taken by Apollo 8 that hasn't received much attention. During an attitude change, the spacecraft was pointing away from the Moon and looking beyond Earth, which appears in the lower left corner. Earth is not the focus of the image. It's decentred from its place at our core. Instead, we're looking into the blackness of space and out to the solar system beyond. It' a Copernican rather than a Ptolemaic vision.
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| Earth, photographed from Apollo 8 during attitude change at 075:58:38. Credit: NASA
It reminds me of something that James Clerk Maxwell said in Matter and Motion, published in 1876.
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There are no
landmarks in space; one portion of space is exactly like every other portion,
so that we cannot tell where we are. We are, as it were, on an unruffied
sea, without stars, compass, sounding, wind or tide, and we cannot tell in
what direction we are going.
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