He took the Earthrise photo, which Nature photographer Galen Rowell described as "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthrise
> Joni Mitchell sings on her 1976 song "Refuge of the Roads": "In a highway service station / Over the month of June / Was a photograph of the Earth / Taken coming back from the Moon / And you couldn't see a city / On that marbled bowling ball / Or a forest or a highway / Or me here least of all …"
Wikipedia links to a nice visualization on youtube of the moments when the photo was taken, synced with the recording of the actual conversation of the Astronauts as recorded by the Apollo 8 equipment:
> He took the Earthrise photo, which Nature photographer Galen Rowell described as "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthrise
Heh. I'd never read/heard that quote before. But no one's photos have touched me more than Galen Rowell's, so it bears an incredible amount of weight to read.
The shutter speed was 1/250th of a second, so the earth rotated about 4 miles or 6 kms while the shutter was open. Not enough to blur the photo obviously, but crazy to think about.
I have no idea how to calculate it, but I interpreted this to mean not that the earth rotated (which everyone is trying to calculate) but that the earth was crossing the horizon of the moon such that four miles of earth crosses the horizon during the shot causing earth blur for a moon-stable reference frame.
From the moon's reference, the Earth orbits around it, traveling 2 × π × distance_moon_earth per orbit. Divide this by 27.3 days (sidereal orbital period) to get the Earth's speed. Multiply by 1/250th of a second. And we find this is, again, much less than 4 miles. Using GNU units:
$ units "2 * pi * moondist / (27.3 day) * (second / 250)"
Definition: 4.0958765 m
I think it's relative and phrased poorly, since the orbiter has to circle the earth at a certain faster speed. But quick googling shows Apollo 8 was traveling about a mile a second?
If the orbital period was 80 minutes then that is 1/1,200,000th of a period and with Earth's circumference being ~25,000 miles that should only be about 0.02 miles.
Or if the orbital velocity was 17,000 mph and neglecting the height of the orbit, 17000 / 3600 / 250 = 0.018 miles.
He took the Earthrise photo, which Nature photographer Galen Rowell described as "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthrise
https://www.abc.net.au/science/moon/earthrise.htm