Aldrin was on the selfie bandwagon long before it was an Internet movement. Astronaut James McDivitt took this dramatic photo of fellow astronaut Ed White outside the spacecraft. Become a BuzzFeed News member. For all of the jaw-dropping, eye-popping, gobsmacking images the Hubble Space Telescope has sent home over the years, the smudgy, black and white picture above right is in some ways the most important. Esther, 1961. It was on this date that a group of soldiers and scientists in the New Mexico desert launched a V-2 rocket – fitted with a 35-millimeter motion picture camera – to a suborbital altitude of 65 miles (105 km). With a 35mm camera strapped to it, the rocket reached an altitude of 65 miles (105 km) and treated humanity to the first ever pictures of our planet taken from space. Bottom line: On October 24, 1946, a movie camera on board the V-2 rocket captured the first photo of Earth from outer space. From the first color photograph of Earth from space to Buzz Aldrin's 1966 spacewalking selfie, an auction of vintage NASA images brings together a lot of fabulous space firsts. Astronomy Picture of the Day . Discussion threads can be closed at any time at our discretion. “[The scientists] were ecstatic,” remembers Fred Rulli, then 19-years-old and charged with recovering the steel film cassette. The first US spacewalk took place in 1965 during the Gemini 4 mission. A vintage print sold for around $9,200. Related article: Buzz Aldrin's 1966 space selfie sells for $9,200. Crew members aborted the mission and returned safely to Earth. The photo depicts the Earth in black-and-white from an altitude of 65 miles. Plus, the fascinatingly low-tech way we tracked storms before we had eyes in orbit. The photo depicts the Earth in black-and-white from an altitude of 65 miles. Sony a7S III vs. the iPhone 12 Pro: An Unfair Comparison? A vintage print of this photo sold at auction for about $2,160. A little. This is the first photograph of Earth ever taken from space. It is shown with a ground-based picture from Las Campanas, Chile, Observatory of the same region of the sky. “It’s only when that happens that you can say first light has been achieved.”. October 24, 1946. Those three and a half years seemed like a long time to wait back then. Air & Space magazine tells the story of this major event in space history: Snapping a new frame every second and a half, the rocket-borne camera climbed straight up, then fell back to Earth minutes later, slamming into the ground at 500 feet per second. According to Air & Space Magazine, More than 1,000 pictures of our planet were taken by cameras aboard … A different astronomy and space science related image is featured each day, along with a brief explanation. If a storm never made landfall, or only did so in one or two locations, it could be lost to history. The dark area at the upper left is the Gulf of California. Write to Jeffrey Kluger at jeffrey.kluger@time.com. Good enough, according to Deputy Assistant Secretary for Scientific Programs Fred Singer, to do real science: Today's satellites can record high-definition, full-color imagery and send it back to Earth nearly instantaneously, and since the '60s, orbital imagery has remained a valuable part of the meteorologist's arsenal. It was captured on 24 October 1946 from a rocket 105 km above the ground that had been … The first photograph from space was taken by the V-2 #13 rocket, which was launched in October, 24th of 1946. US will see a total eclipse of the sun: August 21, 2017.
