The Blue Marble is a famous photograph of the Earth, taken on December 7, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft, at a distance of about 45,000 kilometres (28,000 mi).

The name has also been applied by NASA to a modern series of image data sets covering the entire globe at relatively high resolution, created by carefully sifting through satellite-captured sequences taken over time, to eliminate as much cloud cover as possible from the collated set of images.

The snapshot — taken by astronauts on December 7, 1972, at 5:39 a.m. EST (10:39 UTC) — is likely one of the most widely distributed photographic images in existence. The image is one of the few to show a fully illuminated Earth, as the astronauts had the Sun behind them when they took the image. To the astronauts, Earth had the appearance of a glass marble, hence the name.

The photograph was taken about 5 hours and 6 minutes after launch of the Apollo 17 mission, and about 1 hour 54 minutes after the spacecraft left its parking orbit around the Earth, to begin its trajectory to the Moon. The time of Apollo 17's launch, 12:33 a.m. EST, meant that Africa was in daylight during the early hours of the spacecraft's flight. With the December solstice approaching, Antarctica was also illuminated.

The Blue may refer to:

Coordinates: 51°29′32.48″N 0°03′48.96″W / 51.4923556°N 0.0636°W / 51.4923556; -0.0636

The Blue is a central market place in Bermondsey an area in London. The market is open Monday to Saturday from 9am until 5pm and has about 50 stall holders, selling food and clothes. The area has been known as The Blue for more than two hundred and thirty years and is probably named after the Blue Anchor public house that gave its name to Blue Anchor Lane.

In 2005 a Metropolitan Police report described the area as a crime hotspot for "race crime and youth disorder". In 2009 during the funeral procession of Jade Goody a white dove was released at The Blue, where her family once had a stall.

Gary Jules (born March 19, 1969 as Gary Jules Aguirre, Jr.) is an American singer-songwriter, best known for his cover version of the Tears For Fears classic "Mad World", which Gary recorded with friend Michael Andrews for the film Donnie Darko. It became the UK Christmas Number One single of 2003. Since then, Gary's version has been used on popular American TV shows, in a commercial for the critically acclaimed video game Gears of War, an episode of CSI: Las Vegas, and a Season 5 episode of the medical drama House.

Some of Gary's early projects/bands were The Ivory Knights, Our Town Pansies, Woodenfish, Kofi, The Origin, Invisible, No poetry, and Heroes and Heroin.^{[citation needed]} Gary's 2003 residency at the Los Angeles Hotel Café helped develop the venue as a successful singer/songwriter venue for other artists such as Gary.