Teamed with the images is a moving piece of choral music. It features the voices of the Apollo 8 crew from their broadcast of 1968. They were the first humans to see the far side of the Moon, and on Christmas Eve, while still in space, they gave a reading from Genesis. It began: "For all the people back on Earth the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you. 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep'." The crew was Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot James A Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William A Anders. They end with the beautiful sentiment: "God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth."

Recently we were incredibly honored when William Anders himself contacted us for copies of the show and music. It was thrilling to experience that connection to one of the great pioneers of space flight.

The captions:

01) Title screen - globe and background of the Small Magellenic Galaxy
02) Network of channels in the 'Black River' of the Amazon, Brazil
03) The Brahmaputra River in Tibet seen from the International Space Station
04) Western edge of the Ganges River delta near Calcutta, India
05) Sand dunes, some 300-meters high, in the Namib Desert, Namibia
06) Section of the Bering Glacier in Alaska
07) Low cloud banked against the volcanic Simushir Island, eastern Russia
08) Marshy delta of the Mackenzie River, Canada
09) Sand from the Sahara blows across the Canary Islands
10) Sandstorm sweeps across Qatar on the Persian Gulf
11) Seasonal changes in sea ice and snow in Greenland
12) Seasonal changes in sea ice and snow in Greenland
13) Monument Valley on the southern border of Utah
14) Rainforest surrounds alpine shrubland at Mt Taranaki, New Zealand
15) The 23km-wide iceberg A22A, adrift for five years in the Southern Ocean
16) The Lena Delta in Siberia
17) View over Denmark & the North Sea from the International Space Station
18) Cloud pattern around South Georgia Island in the South Atlantic
19) Fertile banks and delta of the world's longest river, The Nile
20) End screen - globe and background of the Small Magellenic Galaxy

The images in this presentation were used with the kind permission of the Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center, the gateway to astronaut photography of Earth.