A story

Apollo's photographers

The famous Apollo frames have photographers. Armstrong photographed Aldrin. Bill Anders photographed Earthrise. Aldrin turned the camera on his own boot. The flight logs name the frames.

Earthrise. Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders photographs the Earth rising over the Moon, the first time people saw home from another world. — Earthrise

A camera was part of the job

Apollo flew Hasselblad cameras the way it flew radios. The pictures were a task, written into the flight plan, and the frames that came home carry numbers. AS11-40-5903 means Apollo 11, magazine 40, frame 5903. A person can hang the picture without knowing the number. The number is how you know who was holding the camera, because the other person is the one in the suit.

NASA's photographs are works of the United States government. They are in the public domain. The shop prints them with the frame numbers in the credit, which is the honest way to sell a picture that has been reproduced past counting. What follows is who stood where, flight by flight, for six of those frames.

Christmas Eve, 1968, and the way home looked

Earthrise opens this story because it is the wide one, and because it happened first. On December 24, 1968, Apollo 8 was in orbit around the Moon. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders were the crew, the first people to leave Earth orbit. Anders made the photograph catalogued as AS08-14-2383: the lunar horizon in the foreground, the Earth coming up beyond it, blue and small and obviously finite. Nobody had a picture of home from another world before that magazine of film.

The Blue Marble is a different geometry, four years later. On December 7, 1972, outbound to the Moon, the Apollo 17 crew photographed the fully lit Earth. The frame is AS17-148-22727. Africa and Antarctica are in the disk, weather is in the oceans, and the picture is as close as a government photograph gets to a portrait of a planet. The crew made it. The shop's credit leaves the shutter with the crew, which is what the frame record supports, and that is enough.

Tranquility Base, magazine 40

Apollo 11 left Kennedy Space Center on July 16, 1969. On July 20, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked at Tranquility Base. Michael Collins stayed in lunar orbit in the command module. The portrait everyone knows, AS11-40-5903, is Armstrong's photograph of Aldrin. In the gold visor are Armstrong himself, the lunar module, and the flag. The photographer is the reflection. That is the whole trick of the picture, and it is written on the film.

The bootprint is Aldrin's, frame AS11-40-5878. He pointed the camera at the dust his own boot had just arranged. There is no horizon and no module, only the mark, which is why the picture feels like a signature. The flag salute is AS11-40-5875, Aldrin beside the flag he and Armstrong had planted, the same magazine, the same morning. Three frames, one roll of work: a portrait, a footprint, a flag. Armstrong made the portrait. Aldrin made the print of the boot. The flag picture is Aldrin in the frame, so the camera is with Armstrong again.

A car, a salute, and a wall

On August 1, 1971, during Apollo 15, Jim Irwin saluted the flag beside the Lunar Roving Vehicle at Hadley Rille. The frame is AS15-88-11866. The rover was the first car driven on the Moon. Dave Scott was the commander; Irwin was the lunar module pilot, and he is the one at attention in this picture. The module sits behind him. The flag has the same pole-and-crossbar rig the earlier crews used, because there is no wind to fly a flag, only a wire to suggest it.

Six pictures, then, and a sensible hang. Earthrise is the wide world. The Blue Marble is the whole world. The visor portrait is the person. The bootprint is the proof of weight. The flag and Irwin's salute are the ceremony, 1969 and 1971, same gesture, a rover added. The frame numbers are on the sources below, which is where they belong. The photographers were the crews. The film came home in the magazines. Everything else is a print.