Visual Entry · evidence-aware deep view
The Blue Marble
Apollo 17’s full-Earth view turns atmosphere, cloud, ocean and continent into one planetary composition.
Visual literacy · read before concluding
Four questions for this image
Awe is the invitation. Interpretation starts by separating the subject, scale, representation, mechanism, and evidence.
1 · What am I looking at?
Apollo 17’s full-Earth view turns atmosphere, cloud, ocean and continent into one planetary composition.
Displayed: visualization
2 · At what scale?
Planetary scale. A whole-Earth or near-whole-Earth viewpoint.
3 · How was it represented?
Displayed media: Deterministic ICU-authored vector explanatory visualization.
Reviewed source method: Apollo mission image
The normalized BVU record identifies the Apollo mission view, but does not encode camera or processing details here.
4 · What creates the visible effect?
source backed: NASA dates the Apollo 17 view to December 7, 1972. Its visual power comes from seeing the sunlit Earth nearly whole, with blue ocean, white cloud systems and land masses compressed into a single sphere.
Current visual-property tags: color, contrast.
Explanation boundary
Why it looks this way
Only source-backed claims can carry the mechanism/explanation role here. Curated or unknown material stays visibly separate.
NASA dates the Apollo 17 view to December 7, 1972. Its visual power comes from seeing the sunlit Earth nearly whole, with blue ocean, white cloud systems and land masses compressed into a single sphere.
Provenance & evidence
Know what supports the entry.
Source pages support subject identity and claims. The displayed SVG has its own representation and rights record.
It describes the relationship between a factual statement and reviewed evidence. It does not mean the SVG shown on this page is a source photograph, museum image or scientific plate.
The Blue Marble
- Canonical locator
- https://science.nasa.gov/resource/the-blue-marble/
- Source date
- December 7, 1972
- Creator / author
- Apollo 17 crew
- Rights note
- NASA source page; used here as a factual/provenance source, not as runtime media.
Runtime-media boundary
Documentary source pages reviewed. Published runtime media is an original explanatory SVG visualization, not a copied source image.
- reviewed_usable · Original deterministic SVG explanatory visualizations authored for BVU004. These files are ICU-owned presentation media and are visibly labeled as visualizations, not documentary source images.
Displayed media SHA-256: c33c57e22914e4bb6bf37862d89c8629bcc86226e4b49d84f3e29512e6c6dae8
Documentary-media review
This entry keeps its reviewed institutional source pages as provenance/factual references. The current media audit did not promote documentary bytes because explicit reusable rights and same-origin original-byte localization were not both cleared in this bounded pass.
- Runtime image
- Existing same-origin explanatory SVG visualization
- Documentary runtime
- Not published
- Remote hotlink
- Not used
Typed connections
Follow the relationship without upgrading its evidence.
Directionality and evidence class are rendered from the canonical relationship records.
Earthrise
Two Apollo-era whole-Earth views make scale and viewpoint comparable without implying the images share the same geometry.
Curated interpretation: a deliberate discovery connection, not proof of shared cause, influence or mechanism.
Collections & Atlas
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Collection membership is editorial discovery context, not proof of shared mechanism or origin.
Curated journeys
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These paths are editorial navigation. They do not alter this entry’s claim, provenance or relationship evidence state.