Beautiful Photograph du Jour

In early 1966, LSD veteran and Acid Tests choreographer Stewart Brand was sitting on the roof of his apartment building in North Beach (a block away from where Yours Truly was to live a decade later) tripping (ditto for me) when it occurred to him that no photographs of the entire earth had been published by NASA although the agency had been shooting people into space since 1962.

From that musing, Brand launched a campaign that was picked up by major newspapers. NASA relented with the launch of the Apollo 8 mission in 1968 and the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Brand's Whole Earth Catalog later that year.