Earthrise, the famous photograph taken by astronaut William Anders during the Apollo 8 mission, shows Earth rising over the surface of the Moon. Scientific images also have the power to show us the fragility of Earth. She created numerous cyanotypes to illustrate and share the various plant specimens she collected in her field work. British botanist Anna Atkins, often regarded as the first female photographer, worked with cyanotypes-shadow images that are created by placing objects onto light-sensitive paper and then exposing the paper and object to the sun.
Scientists first began using photography to document the world around them and share their findings. A new release from Aperture, Seeing Science: How Photography Reveals the Universe, provides a survey of such images, from a X-ray diffraction photograph of DNA to an image of the Event Horizon Telescope, which will attempt to produce the first image of a black hole.
Scientific images, spawned by explorations into worlds we cannot see with the human eye-be they too small and intricate or too large and far away-have not only helped humans understand themselves and their surroundings, but have also documented the advances and challenges of our times. “There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world,” he wrote. Sagan thought this image of a barely visible Earth could help humanity more precisely understand our place in a vast and endless universe. One of the images that astronomer Carl Sagan hoped the probe would capture was that of Earth as the probe left the confines of our solar system, leaving our little planet, a “pale blue dot,” behind. When the Voyager 1 space probe was launched in 1977, it was equipped with a camera to chronicle its travels through the cosmos.
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