First Color Photo of Earth from Space (Part IV):

Life Magazine & Aftermath

The story of the first color photographs of the Earth from space continues in Otto Berg’s own words, with light edits and editorial notes.

In this new enthusiasm over the montage, my new Boss, Dr Les Meredith, and I decided to take the photo to the National Geographic Society in the hopes that they would be sufficiently interested to reproduce the montage in professional color. They sadly declined based on the very high cost of doing that. On the return to the Lab., we passed by the Life magazine Offices and decided to see if they would print it in true color. Seconds after we entered the Life magazine offices, we were surrounded by every member of that organization, I believe even the janitors. They tried their darnedest to talk us into leaving the photo at Life overnight, but […]

First Color Photo of Earth from Space (Part III):

More Useful Purposes

The story of the first color photographs of the Earth from space continues in Otto Berg’s own words, with light edits and editorial notes. 

The next day, I brought the montage (actually, I simply referred to it as a mosaic until Life magazine referred to it as a montage) into the Lab and, again, my colleagues were mostly impressed by the large area of planet Earth shown and the curvature of the horizon.

Detail of the NRL-Berg Mosaic detailing the “discovery” of a tropical storm over Texas and the value of space spaced photography for weather observation

The montage occupied a humble spot on the workbench in our labs for several days as we would briefly discuss it over a cup of coffee. Eventually we began to realize that the huge white cloud glob in the picture was somewhat […]

First Color Photo of Earth from Space (Part II):

The Mission & the Montage

Aerobee Rocket AJ-10-24 carrying the first color film to record Earth from space with unidentified Navy personnel, October 1, 1954 (4 days before launch). Credit: Department of the Navy, courtesy White Sands Missile Range Museum

The story of the first color photographs of the Earth from space continues in Otto Berg’s own words, with light edits and editorial notes. The individual Earth photos appearing here (other than Berg’s original montage) were scanned and processed from the decades old internegatives that Otto Berg produced in order to create the Earth Montage in 1954. There was significant color fading of the negatives as compared with the 16mm film itself, which will be scanned as individual frames at the highest resolution available. For now, the images appearing here are the best versions of these images available, though when the 16mm film […]