Astronomy News
Dr. Neal Sumerlin keeps us abreast of happenings in the night sky and the progress of the new Belk Astronomical Observatory.
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Other Posts:
Describing the Indescribable (07/22/2009)
Total Solar Eclipse in July (06/07/2009)
Other Earths (05/20/2009)
Save Those Old Computers! (04/13/2009)
Play With Pictures from Mars! (04/13/2009)
Saturn in 2009 (04/13/2009)
The New Worlds (02/04/2009)
Potpourri of Space News (12/10/2008)
Night Sky Happenings (11/17/2008)
Power Sources for Space Probes (11/17/2008)
R.I.P., Mars Phoenix Lander (11/17/2008)
Pictures of Planets (11/17/2008)
Ice Geysers of Enceladus (09/22/2008)
Constellations (09/22/2008)
Happy Equinox Day! (09/22/2008)
More News from Mars (06/04/2008)
Search (but no rescue) on Mars (05/20/2008)
We lose a friend (05/03/2008)
Quiz winner! (04/29/2008)
Seeing and Patience (04/22/2008)
The World at Night (03/31/2008)
New Stars that are Really Old (03/14/2008)
Latest From Planetary Spacecraft (03/14/2008)
Lunar Eclipse Update (02/18/2008)
Aiming a Telescope (02/18/2008)
Observatory Update (02/04/2008)
Venus and Jupiter in the Morning (02/04/2008)
Total Lunar Eclipse (02/04/2008)
Messenger Mission to Mercury (02/04/2008)
Christmas at the Moon
Posted on 12/10/2008Forty years ago this Christmas Eve, three American astronauts were orbiting the moon for the first time in human history.
1968 was a momentous year, the kind of time that produces numerous books with that date as part of the title. Even those of us who were callow high school graduates/college freshmen knew that there were more than the usual number of events that would be remembered for a long time. Most of those events were not happy ones. Assassinations, riots: I recall distinctly urging my then-girlfriend not to give up on America even as I struggled with that impulse myself.
Apollo 8, the mission that sent Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders around the moon, has been eclipsed in cultural memory by the Apollo 11 moon landing, and by the "successful failure" mission of Apollo 13. If you want to be remembered, have Ron Howard make a movie about you! Indeed, if the average person knows anything about Jim Lovell, it is probably that he was played by Tom Hanks in that movie.
To me at least, Apollo 8 represented a larger leap from what preceded it than Apollo 11. For the first time, human beings escaped the Earth's gravitational influence. For the first time, human beings looked back on the Earth as a whole planet that they could cover with a thumb. For the first time, human beings looked down on a battered and utterly alien world from a distance of only 70 miles.
What many of us remember most, though, happened on Christmas Eve. As a black-and-white TV camera relayed pictures of the moon's surface sliding under the spacecraft's window, the three crew members took turns reading from the first ten verses of Genesis, the creation story. It was incredibly moving to see those images and hear those words. I was visiting with relatives for the holidays, and I remember very distinctly stepping outside, looking up at the half-lit moon in the sky, and telling myself that there were three men up there. It is still something that fills me with wonder.
Jim Lovell, among the most good-natured of all the astronauts, described one congratulatory telegram that stood out from all the rest. It read simply, "Thank you for saving 1968."
There are no really high-resolution movies that I have found of this broadcast, but the impact can still be felt even with the low-quality images available. NASA's page, with both small and large-image video, is here: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/apollo8_xmas.html. The iconic photograph of "Earthrise" taken by Bill Anders is the other most-remembered item.
http://www.math.montana.edu/frankw/ccp/cases/Global-Positioning/round-earth/earthrise.gif
http://www.math.montana.edu/frankw/ccp/cases/Global-Positioning/round-earth/earthrise.gif
An excellent account of this (an excerpt from his book "Boom") by Tom Brokaw is here: http://www.newsweek.com/id/69585/output/print. For an idea of what the astronauts saw, go here: http://space.jaxa.jp/movie/20080411_kaguya_movie01_j.html This is a movie taken by a Japanese satellite in orbit around the moon. Yes, these are real images.