"The half-lit Earth, 14-24 November"

NASA AS13-50-7353

vintage chromogenic print on fiber-based paper

"A KODAK PAPER" watermark on verso (issued by NASA Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston, Texas)

Breathtaking photograph of the perfect hemisphere of the Earth taken from the lunar module of the Apollo 12 mission. Apollo 12, which took place from November 14 to 24, 1969, was the second manned moon landing, which, in accordance with Kennedy's directive, took place in the 1960s, the fourth flight of astronauts to the moon, and the sixth manned mission in the Apollo program. The photograph was taken by one of the astronauts, Alan Bean, Pete Conrad, or Richard Gordon. The photograph shows the entire American continent. North America can be seen at the top, while South America extends downwards. The image was taken after translunar injection—a maneuver to move from Earth orbit to a trajectory toward the moon—with an 80-mm lens from an altitude of about 30,000 kilometers, after the lunar module had been transposed, docked, and extracted, and the Saturn IV B stage had been jettisoned. At that time, the Apollo 12 crew transmitted live television images back to Earth:
004:19:55 Bean: Earth is about one and a half times the size of a basketball right now.
004:22:41 Gordon: Houston, we’re changing the scenery on you (with the TV camera); we’ll come back to that S-IVB just before it goes.
004:22:58 Gordon: How does the homeland look to you?
004:23:02 Carr (Mission Control): Beginning to look kind of small.