Humanity traveled 240,000 miles to explore the moon and came home with a picture of Earth. This episode reconstructs Christmas Eve 1968, when Apollo 8's William Anders, assigned to photograph lunar craters for future landing sites, saw the planet rise over the gray horizon and scrambled for a roll of color Ektachrome while Commander Frank Borman joked that the shot was not on the schedule. We examine the modified Hasselblad with its external sighting ring, the exposure settings needed to keep Earth from blowing out against black space, and the decades-long dispute over who took the photo, finally settled in 2013 when NASA Goddard synchronized Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter terrain data with the mission audio.

We also follow the film's surprisingly analog journey after splashdown, a four-hour drive from Houston to a family-owned lab in Corpus  ...