Earthrise from Lunar Orbiter 1. The Lunar Orbiter spacecraft were used by NASA to select the Apollo landing sites on the Moon. This image was obtained on 23 August 1966 and shows the Earth (upper right) emerging over the limb of the Moon. The photos obtained by Lunar Orbiter 1 were the first of the Earth as seen from lunar orbit. The full-resolution images were not recovered from the data at the time, meaning the original images had stripe artifacts (seen at left and right). In 2008, the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) restored the original tape drives and produced digitised and high-resolution images from the analogue data. An example of this image restoration is the portion of this image showing the Earth and the lunar surface below the Earth.