On this day in 1972, the astronauts of Apollo 17 took this photograph of Earth, The Blue Marble. The Sun was behind the spacecraft, so the disk of our planet was almost completely illuminated. Africa, the Arabian peninsula, and Madagascar are easily visible; ice-covered Antarctica is largely obscured by clouds. Apollo 17, with Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and Jack Schmitt aboard, was the last crewed mission to go to the Moon. The Blue Marble is one of the most widely distributed pictures in the world.
