The Blue Marble is a photograph of Earth taken on December 7, 1972, by one of the astronauts aboard the Apollo 17 spacecraft on its way to the Moon. Viewed from around 29,400 kilometers (18,300 mi; 15,900 nmi) from Earth's surface, a cropped, rotated, and processed version has become one of the most reproduced images in history. In the original NASA image, named AS17-148-22727 and centered at abo The Blue Marble was not the first clear color image taken of an illuminated face of Earth, since such images by satellites had already been made and released as early as 1967. Before the Blue Marble, a picture of the fully illuminated Earth by the ATS-3 satellite was used in 1968 by Stewart Brand for his Whole Earth Catalog, after campaigning since 1966 to have NASA release a then-rumored satellite image of the entire Earth as seen from space. He got inspired during an LSD trip, seeing a "psychedelic illusion" of the Earth's curvature, convincing him that a picture of the entire planet would change how humans related to it. He sold and distributed buttons for 25 cents each that asked: "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" During this campaign, Brand met… In the… The Blue Marble was not the first clear color image taken of an illuminated face of Earth, since such images by satellites had already been made and released as early as 1967. Before the Blue Marble, a picture of the fully illuminated Earth by the ATS-3 satellite was used in 1968 by Stewart Brand for his Whole Earth Catalog, after campaigning since 1966 to have NASA release a then-rumored satellite image of the entire Earth as seen from space. He got inspired during an LSD trip, seeing a "psychedelic illusion" of the Earth's curvature, convincing him that a picture of the entire planet would change how humans related to it. He sold and distributed buttons for 25 cents each that asked: "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" During this campaign, Brand met Buckminster Fuller, who offered to help Brand with his project. Several of the pins made their way to NASA employees. In the same year the popular photograph Earthrise was taken by William Anders of Apollo 8 and eventually in 1969 the crew of Apollo 10 took a photo of the almost completely illuminated Earth, which was then used for the first version of the Earth Flag, before being replaced by the Blue Marble photo. Apollo 17 was the first mission that had the opportunity to photograph most of the Earth face completely lit in daylight, an opportunity prepared for and tightly observed and vividly described by the crew.The astronauts had the Earth's South Pole facing upwards and the Sun above them (in spatial navigation terms, to their zenith) when they took the image. To the astronauts, the Earth had the appearance and size of a glass marble. At that time, Africa was in noon daylight and with the December solstice approaching, Antarctica was also illuminated. The picture has a 50% (26-50%) cloud cover, and shows many weather systems, featuring a Shapyro–Keyser cyclone near to the center of the image. Cyclone Sixteen (16B) can be seen in the upper right of the image. This storm had brought flooding and high winds to the Indian state of Tamil Nadu on December 5, two days before the photograph was taken. According to the photograph description by NASA it was taken at 05:39 a.m EST (10:39 UTC), 5 hours 6 minutes after launch of the Apollo 17 mission, and about 1 hour 54 minutes after the spacecraft left its parking orbit around Earth to begin its trajectory to the Moon. Alternatively, Eric Hartwell has identified it as having been taken slightly earlier at 5 hours 3 minutes, when one crew member states having changed the f-number, presumably between AS17-148-22725, the first of the sequence of photos, and the following less exposed images like The Blue Marble. The photograph's official NASA designation is AS17-148-22727. It is the third of a sequence of shots which were taken just before and are nearly identical, NASA photograph AS17-148-22725 and AS17-148-22726, the second also having been used as a full-Earth image. The widely published versions are cropped, rotated with south pointing up relative to the capsule, and chromatically adjusted from the original photographs. A subsequent release was made in 2005, named Blue Marble Next Generation. This series of digital image mosaics was produced with the aid of automated image-sifting upon images from NASA's Earth Observatory, which enabled the inclusion of a complete, cloud-free globe for each month from January to December 2004, at even higher resolution (500 m/pixel). The original release of a single-image set covering the entire globe could not reflect the extent of seasonal snow-and-vegetative cover across both hemispheres, but this newer release closely modeled the changes of the seasons. A number of interactive viewers for these data have also been released, among them a music visualization for the PlayStation 3 that is based on the texture data. On July 21, 2015, NASA released a new Blue Marble photograph taken by the U.S. Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), a solar weather and Earth observation satellite in Sun-synchronous orbit at the Sun–Earth Lagrange point L1, with a near-continuous day-side view of Earth, which was launched in February 2015. The image was taken on July 6, 2015. The photograph, of the Western Hemisphere, is centered over Central America. The Western United States, Mexico and the Caribbean are visible, but much of South America is hidden beneath cloud cover. Greenland can be seen at the upper edge of the image. In April 2026, Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman took a photo of the Earth from the Orion Integrity spacecraft's window while traveling toward the Moon for a lunar flyby. NASA's caption for the image notes that two auroras are visible and that zodiacal light can be seen as the Earth eclipses the Sun. This photo was titled Hello, World. Like the