Who took the famous The Blue Marble photo?
The Blue Marble is the most famous photo of the entire features of the Earth but it is unknown to the public who really took this image.
It featured swirling clouds over the south polar ice cap and a breathtaking view of Africa and it looked like a marble. Based on the article in Mental Floss, this was taken on December 7, 1972. That was roughly five hours after the Apollo 17 mission launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
At that time, the Saturn V rocket was more or less 28,000 miles from Earth. Commander Eugene Cernan, Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, and Ronald Evans were the astronauts aboard the rocket.
The Blue Marble was one of the photos captured over a several-minute period. The astronauts were taking turns in taking images with a Hasselblad Camera. There was an audio recording of this but still, no one can pinpoint who among the three astronauts took the exact marble-like image of the Earth.
It was said that the three astronauts were not telling the public who really took the photo or rather all of them were claiming that they took it and this created confusion.
“I think the crew got together and said, ‘Let’s don’t really tell them, and when they ask, you just say you took it,” former NASA archivist Mike Gentry has a theory as to why three astronauts did not say who took the photo. It could be possible that the three of them wanted to take credit for this famous photo of the Earth.
Meanwhile, another famous image is the iconic Einstein Tongue Photo. The science genius Albert Einstein showed his tongue to the paparazzi who did not stop taking photos of him when he was leaving his 72nd birthday party at Princeton University.