For those old enough to remember, the 40th anniversary of the moon landing brings back memories of “One small step,” lunar bootprints, and the first grainy photos of an American flag flown some 240,000 miles from home. But the photos sent back from the Apollo missions were not only of the lunar landscape. In Earthrise: How We First Saw Ourselves, Robert Poole reminds us that the late 1960s also marked the first time man that man viewed Earth from space.

Command Module Pilot Michael Collins of the Apollo 11 mission remembered, “I looked out of my window and tried to find Earth. The little planet is so small out there in the vastness that at first I couldn’t even locate it. And when I did, a tingling of awe spread over me. There it was, shining like a jewel in a black sky. I looked at it in wonderment, suddenly aware of how its uniqueness is stamped in every atom of my body. . .”

It is no coincidence, Poole contends, that the years following the space missions saw the inauguration of the first Earth Day and the rise of the environmental movement. With the image of our beautiful “blue marble” beamed to households all over the world, the race to the moon became a long look back at the starting line. In Earthrise, Poole lets us witness this marble again, 40 years later, but no less amazing.

See the footage below for a glimpse of the other-worldly view from a moon lander.