This grainy black-and-white photo was one of the first images of Earth taken from space. It was snapped on October 24, 1946 from a V-2 missile at an altitude of 65 miles. The V-2 was launched from the White Sands Missile Range in south central New Mexico.
From Air & Space magazine:
More than 1,000 Earth pictures were returned from V-2s between 1946 and 1950, from altitudes as high as 100 miles. The photos, showing huge expanses of the American southwest, appeared in newspapers and were scrutinized by scientists from the U.S. Weather Bureau. In his (1950) National Geographic article, (Clyde) Holliday, (who developed the camera that captured the images), offered a few predictions as to where it all might lead: “Results of these tests now are pointing to a time when cameras may be mounted on guided missiles for scouting enemy territory in war, mapping inaccessible regions of the earth in peacetime, and even photographing cloud formations, storm fronts, and overcast areas over an entire continent in a few hours.” Going out on a limb, he speculated that “the entire land area of the globe might be mapped in this way.”