There are some things you just can’t get from a book.

Magazines like Life and Look ran huge, beautiful photo spreads when Apollo 8, the first manned journey to the moon, brought back pictures like this.

We’ve all seen these photos. The images are so familiar now that it’s hard to understand that there was a time when they were astonishing and disorienting — a time when it seemed they just might revolutionize earthbound thinking.

I’ve spent many hours gazing at those photos. They show us ourselves, from a new perspective. Yet, I think my understanding falls short. We can’t adequately grasp this view of the world by looking at photographs. To fully understand it, I think, we must see it through a window. We must see it with our own eyes.

Earthbound thinking is tough to revolutionize.

Thirty-six years ago today, human beings first touched down on the moon in the Sea of Tranquility.

Most of the world’s population today were born after the landing. A man on the moon is not a hopeful futuristic idea, but a half-forgotten historical event.

In his autobiography, Last Man on the Moon, astronaut Eugene Cernan writes:

Sometimes it seems that Apollo came before its time. President Kennedy reached far into the twenty-first century, grabbed a decade of time and slipped it neatly into the 1960s and 1970s. Logic dictates that after Mercury and Gemini, we should have proceeded to build the shuttle, then an orbiting space station, and only then sought the Moon. As it was, we accomplished the impossible, then started over again.

Here are lunar panoramas and photographs from the Apollo missions.