“well it’s not on the flight plan”
Apollo Astronaut Shares Story of NASA’s Earthrise Photo
Anders said after the first two-and-a-half to three orbits, they were going backwards, head down, marveling at the lunar surface, and it wasn’t until after they had made a, “collective maneuver to circularize our orbit at 60 nautical miles, that we rolled over, heads up and turned around, going forward, like you would be driving a car around the moon.”
The crew was in sunlight and Anders was shooting pictures out of the side of the spacecraft, as this was one of his designated jobs.
“I don’t know who said it, maybe all of us said, ‘Oh my God. Look at that!’”Anders said. “And up came the Earth. We had had no discussion on the ground, no briefing, no instructions on what to do. I jokingly said, ‘well it’s not on the flight plan,’ and the other two guys were yelling at me to give them cameras. I had the only color camera with a long lens. So I floated a black and white over to Borman. I can’t remember what Lovell got. There were all yelling for cameras, and we started snapping away.”
