Earth Globe in Space Coloring Page: Free PDF Sheet

Earth as a Planet: Facts Kids Can Color By

The First Full Photograph of Earth

No complete photograph of the whole Earth existed until December 7, 1972, when the crew of Apollo 17 pointed a Hasselblad camera back at the planet roughly 18,000 miles into their journey to the Moon. The resulting image, nicknamed the Blue Marble, remains one of the most reproduced photographs in history. Before that flight, every prior spacecraft had been too close or at the wrong angle to capture the entire sunlit disk in one frame, so people had only ever seen partial views or artist renderings of their home planet from a distance.

Why the Globe Shape Became Standard

Globes have modeled Earth as a sphere since at least 150 BCE, when the Greek scholar Crates of Mallus is credited with building one of the earliest known examples, though none of his originals survive. The oldest surviving terrestrial globe, the Erdapfel built by German merchant Martin Behaim in 1492, predates Columbus's reports of the Americas, so it shows only Europe, Asia, and Africa. Globe makers had to redraw their maps completely once explorers charted the western hemisphere over the following century.

How Big Earth Actually Is

Earth measures about 7,918 miles across at the equator and roughly 24,901 miles around, a distance a jet airliner cruising at 550 miles per hour would take about 45 hours to circle nonstop. The planet is not a perfect sphere - it bulges slightly at the equator because its own spin flattens the poles, a shape geographers call an oblate spheroid. That bulge is too small to notice on a coloring page or a classroom globe, but satellites can measure it precisely.

The Water and Land Split

Oceans cover about 71 percent of Earth's surface, which is why the planet looks mostly blue from space and earned the nickname the Blue Planet. The Pacific Ocean alone is larger than all of Earth's landmasses combined. Freshwater lakes and rivers make up a tiny sliver of the remaining water, and most of that freshwater is actually locked away as ice in Antarctica and Greenland rather than flowing on the surface.

Clouds and the Atmosphere from Above

At any given moment, clouds cover roughly two-thirds of Earth's surface, swirling in patterns shaped by ocean currents, mountain ranges, and the planet's rotation. Weather satellites photograph these swirl patterns continuously, and meteorologists use the shapes to track storms days before they reach land. The thin blue line visible at the edge of Earth in space photographs is the atmosphere - a layer of breathable air only about 6 miles thick compared to the planet's 7,918-mile diameter.

Earth's Trip Around the Sun

Earth travels around the Sun at approximately 67,000 miles per hour, completing one full orbit every 365.25 days - the extra quarter-day is why a leap day is added to the calendar every four years. The planet simultaneously spins on its own axis once every 24 hours, and that spin is what creates day and night as different sides of the globe face the Sun. Both motions happen at once, which is part of why early astronomers took centuries to work out that Earth moves rather than staying still.