The most famous picture of the Earth

The Blue Marble is a famous photograph of the Earth taken on December 7, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft, when they were about 45,000 kilometers (28,000 miles) away from our planet. This photograph has become one of the most widely circulated images ever. It's one of the few pictures that clearly show the entire Earth, thanks to the fact that the spaceship was positioned away from the Sun at the time of the shot. For the astronauts aboard the spacecraft, the Earth appeared to be about the size of a marble that children play with, and thus it was named accordingly.