On December 24, 1968, Christmas Eve, astronaut William Anders took what would become one of the most consequential photographs in human history. He was aboard Apollo 8, orbiting the Moon for the fourth time, when the spacecraft rotated and the Earth appeared in his window. A small, luminous sphere, blue and white, suspended in the blackness above the barren lunar horizon. Anders grabbed his Hasselblad camera, loaded a roll of Kodak Ektachrome color film, and pressed the shutter. The photograph would later be called Earthrise.

No one had planned for that image. It wasn’t on the flight schedule. When Anders said “Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty,” and reached for the camera, Commander Frank Borman joked: “Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled.” But Anders did, and the result was a picture that showed humanity what no words ever could: a tiny, delicate world, hanging in the void of the universe, with no borders visible and no indication of all the wars, the politics, and the noise below.

Anders, who died in June 2024 at the age of 90, once reflected on the Apollo 8 mission and said something remarkable: They had gone all the way to the Moon – and what they really discovered was the Earth.

Fifty-eight years later, on April 2, 2026, another astronaut held a camera up to a spacecraft window. Reid Wiseman, commander of NASA’s Artemis II mission, had just completed the translunar injection burn that sent the Orion spacecraft and its crew of four on a trajectory toward the Moon. Through the window, he saw the Earth, now eclipsing the Sun, flanked by two shimmering auroras and a faint band of zodiacal light. He took the photograph and it was downlinked to Houston shortly after. NASA titled it Hello, World.

It is the first image of our planet taken by human hands from deep space in over half a century.

Wiseman, along with pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, launched from Kennedy Space Center on April 1. They are the first crew to travel toward the Moon since Apollo 17 in December 1972. Koch is the first woman on a lunar mission. Glover is the first person of color. Hansen is the first Canadian. Their Orion spacecraft, which they named Integrity, will carry them around the far side of the Moon and back over the course of ten days.

Between Anders’s photograph and Wiseman’s, more than two generations have passed. Smallpox was eradicated. The Berlin Wall fell. The Web was born. A hundred and ninety-six countries agreed to protect the climate. A pandemic swept the globe. And yet the Earth in both images looks remarkably, stubbornly the same – a bright, quiet blue marble against an ocean of black, impossibly vivid, impossibly alone.

Some images ask nothing of you except that you look.

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