Fifty years ago more than 500 million people around the world watched the moon landing and were spellbound by the images brought back to earth from the lunar surface. Neil Armstrong's first step on the moon was a giant leap for space photography. The images clicked by the crew of Apollo 11 produced the first color photograph of our planet from the moon as well as images of the moon's surface that were never seen before. However, at the beginning of the space programme hardly anyone thought of photographs from space as anything more than a branch of industrial photography.