Everywhere there was a television, people grew attentive, and the world stared as the camera on Apollo 8 finally turned on. Because the camera angle looked through the edge of the capsule's window, the initial image was distorted by spherical aberration. Below a tiny white blob, which was probably the earth, ran a number of horizontal streaks, one on top of another.
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Borman spoke first. His crisp voice rang out clearly. "This is Apollo 8 coming to you live from the moon . . . We showed you first a view of earth as we've been watching it for the past sixteen hours." He paused. "Now we're switching so that we can show you the moon that we've been flying over at [seventy] miles altitude for the last sixteen hours."
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As Anders shifted the camera, it accidently switched off, leaving earth with nothing but a series of gray bars. Without a TV monitor or eyepiece, however, the astronauts had no way of knowing this.
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Borman continued, "Bill Anders, Jim Lovell and myself have spent the day before Christmas up here doing experiments, taking pictures, and firing our spacecraft engine to maneuver around. What we'll do now is follow the trail that we've been following all day and take you on through to a lunar sunset."
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Ironically, the lack of a picture at this moment seemed to magnify their words. "The moon is a different thing to each one of us," Borman said. "I think that each one carried his own impression of what he's seen today. I know my impression is that it's a vast, lonely, forbidding-type existence, or expanse of nothing. It looks rather like clouds and clouds of pumice stone and it certainly would not appear to be a very inviting place to live or work. Jim, what have you thought most about?"
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Jim Lovell's deeper voice hesitated slightly as he searched for the right words. "Well, Frank, my thoughts were very similar. The vast loneliness up here at the moon is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realize what you have back there on earth. The earth from here is a grand oasis in the big vastness of space."
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"Bill, what do you think?" Borman asked.
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Anders's voice, though similar to Franks, had a softer, introspective quality to it. "I think the thing that impressed me the most was the lunar sunrises and sunsets. These in particular bring out the stark nature of the terrain."
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About this moment the astronauts paused, and Jerry Carr radioed that they didn't have a picture. Lovell immediately spotted the problem and switched the camera back on.
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