Earthrise (December 24th, 1968)

William Anders

Taken during the Apollo 8 mission, the first manned voyage to orbit the Moon

 

“And as I surveyed them from this point, all the other heavenly bodies appeared to be glorious and wonderful — now the stars were such as we have never seen from this earth; and such was the magnitude of them all as we have never dreamed; and the least of them all was that planet, which farthest from the heavenly sphere and nearest to our earth, was shining with borrowed light, but the spheres of the stars easily surpassed the earth in magnitude — already the earth itself appeared to me so small, that it grieved me to think of our empire, with which we cover but a point, as it were, of its surface.” — Cicero, Somnium Scipionis ∆ ¶

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∆  Somnium Scipionis or The Dream of Scipio is the sixth book Cicero’s De re publica, and describes a fictional dream vision of Scipio Aemilianus, set two years before he oversaw the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC. The Roman general is taken up into the sphere of distant stars to gaze back towards the Earth from the furthest reaches of the cosmos.