John Gastaldo Photographer

"We discovered the earth"

Photographers are usually calm when getting to a photo shoot, unless it's someone special. Many of us are lucky to count on many hands world leaders, celebrities and the "famous for no reason at all" portraits we've made. Almost two decades ago, I considered myself somewhat experienced, but I had never photographed an astronaut, or as my daughter used to say in her humorous toddler-speak, "astro-snot." 

Late in December 2006, I was assigned to photograph William "Bill" Anders, an Apollo 8 astronaut and part-time San Diego resident.  The newspaper was doing a story about the Christmas space mission on which he had flown, the first time a spacecraft left earth's gravitational pull, orbited the moon, and amazingly, returned. The story also highlighted how a photo taken by Anders during that flight may have inadvertently jump-started the earth movement. 

1968 was a very difficult year for America. The Vietnam War's Tet Offensive, race riots, social unrest, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were some of the bad memories. 

Looking forward was difficult. 

On December 21, Apollo 8 lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It took three days to reach the moon. On Christmas Eve, on the astronauts' fourth of ten orbits, Mission Commander Frank Borman performed a roll maneuver which put the crew in position to watch the Earth ascending over the lunar horizon through viewing windows. Bill Anders saw Earth emerging first and alerted the other two, all while taking a black-and-white photograph with his customized-for-space 70mm Hasselblad film camera. He then reloaded the camera with color film as fast as he could and activated the shutter again, immortalizing an image of our planet we now know as "Earthrise."  

On my way to the hangar with my earthly, digital Canons, I was nervous. This was a real-life astronaut! I remember watching rocket launches on TV as a kid and in particular the last launch, Apollo 17 when I was sick from grade school in 1972. 

Astronauts are special. Their personality, their training, their abilities to stay calm and focused under extreme pressure, they are just not like the rest of us. I came prepped with studio lights and a soft box for my best effort. Even though I was not as acquainted with "Earthrise" as I should have been, I thanked Anders for what he had accomplished. We spoke of the P-51 Mustang behind him in the photo(not his, but he owned one just like it), the fact that "earth rise" is actually sideways with the moon coming out of the left side of the photo, why he seemed too young to have been a NASA Apollo astronaut(at launch he was only 35), and how he spent half the year in his hometown of San Diego and half the year in the San Juan Islands in Washington State, IMHO, the best of both worlds. Then as I got ready to push my shutter, I had to asked him how it felt to have taken a photo so influential in starting the earth movement. He was so modest, he didn't really have an answer to a question asked many times before, and I changed the subject. I'll offer up this quote from him not long after Apollo 8 came back to earth: 

"We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth."


RIP Major General(Ret.)William "Bill" Anders, and thank you. 


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