I was browsing Wiki this AM and came across this photograph, to my amazement. In a way, we are all passengers aboard this Spaceship Mother Earth hurdling through space....fascinating stuff.
an excerpt:
The Blue Marble is a famous photograph of the Earth taken on 7 December 1972 by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft at a distance of about 45,000 kilometers or about 28,000 miles.[1] It is one of the most widely distributed photographic images in existence. The image is one of the few to show a fully lit Earth, as the astronauts had the Sun behind them when they took the image. To the astronauts, Earth had the appearance of a child's glass marble (hence the name).
more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_blue_marble