Empirical Earth · We Went to the Moon — the Landings Were Real

Composite vs. real — the ‘Blue Marble’

The claim

“NASA admits its Earth photos are composites — so all are fake.”

What is measured

The 1972 ‘Blue Marble’ is a real single film frame. The 2002/2012 versions are openly-labeled mosaics (a low-orbit satellite is too close for a full-disc shot), and DSCOVR/EPIC has taken genuine single-shot full-disc images daily since 2015. ‘Composite’ is not ‘fake.’

What would show this is wrong

evidence that the 1972 Apollo 17 frame is itself a composite, or that no single-exposure full-disc image of Earth (e.g. DSCOVR/EPIC) exists.

Sources

  1. The Blue Marble: photo vs. composite. The 1972 Apollo 17 ‘Blue Marble’ (AS17-148-22727) is a single Hasselblad film frame; NASA’s 2002/2012 ‘Blue Marble’ images are openly-labeled satellite link
  2. Full-disc Earth imaged continuously by many nations. Japan’s Himawari geostationary satellite posts a full-disc, ~121-megapixel image of the round Earth every 10 minutes; the US GOES, Europe link
  3. DSCOVR/EPIC: the Moon transiting the sunlit Earth. From the Sun–Earth L1 point (~1.5 million km), NASA/NOAA’s EPIC camera images the fully sunlit Earth continuously and, about twice a year, link
  4. Earthrise (Apollo 8). AS8-14-2383, taken by William Anders on 24 December 1968 during Apollo 8 — a single hand-held color frame of the whole Earth rising over the Moon, four years before the link
  5. Earth seen from across the Solar System. Spacecraft from Voyager 1 (the “Pale Blue Dot,” 1990, ~6 billion km) to Cassini at Saturn (“The Day the Earth Smiled,” 2013) to Mars orbiters have im link
  6. Earth by hand from Artemis II. During the April 2026 crewed flight around the Moon, the Artemis II crew photographed the full disc of Earth, including the frames NASA released as “Hello, Wor link
  7. Robert Simmon on building the 2002 “Blue Marble.” The NASA data visualizer who assembled the 2002 composite described the process openly: cloud fields collaged with the Photoshop clone tool, link
  8. NASA image catalog entry and exposure data for AS17-148-22727. Hasselblad 500EL, 80 mm Zeiss Planar at f/2.8, 70 mm Kodak Ektachrome SO-368 color reversal film, shutter 1/250 second, taken 7 link
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