Full moon will dawn the skies on Christmas

The photograph also shows the Compton crater in the foreground. If you’re an astronaut on the surface of the moon, though, you don’t see the opposite thing happen with Earth. The Atlantic and Pacific coasts of South America are visible to the left.

The center of the Earth is just off the coast of Liberia, evoking the famous “Blue Marble” image taken by Apollo 17 astronauts, which also prominently featured Africa. That said, the Earth’s appearance does change, thanks to its rotation and changing cloud cover. The composite image is a combination of data acquired by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC.

About 40 years after Earthlings first saw its planet from the surface of the moon, NASA has released a stunning image of the Home Planet rising above the lunar surface.

“From the Earth, the daily moonrise and moonset are always inspiring moments”, said Mark Robinson of Arizona State University in Tempe, principal investigator for LROC.

Because one side of the moon – known as the nearside – is always facing toward Earth from our perspective due to an effect known as tidal locking, the Earth never actually rises or sets from the moon’s perspective. Mission controllers needed to command the craft onto its side and then allow it to slide to get its best look at the moon’s horizon while LRO was moving at more than 3,580 miles per hour relative to the moon’s surface, NASA said.

The Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) on LRO takes high resolution black-and-white images, while the lower resolution Wide Angle Camera (WAC) takes color images, so the two camera images are combined (with some special processing) to create the one high-rez image.

And the agency’s most iconic Earthrise photo was taken by the crew of the Apollo 8 mission as the spacecraft entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve December 24, 1968.