EARTH
EXPLORER!

Apollo crews called it the blue marble, a small bright bead in black velvet. Deep oceans absorb reds from sunlight and scatter blues back toward space cameras while white clouds swirl like cream. Land shows brown-green continents; polar caps flash ice white. Other rocky planets look rust or tan because they lack a global ocean and thick wet atmosphere tuned to scatter short wavelengths the way ours does, a signature of a living, leaking, raining world.