Footnotes

Using a hand-held, modified 70mm Hasselblad 500C camera loaded with Ektachrome MS S.O. 217 color film, Young set the lens to 1/250th of a second at f/11. This particular photograph shows northern Mexico (Sonora and Baja California just above the Gulf of California) in the foreground, with California and Arizona in the background. The Imperial Valley is visible in the center, with the Salton Sea under cloud cover above it. The light-brown circular area in the lower right is the Sonoran Desert.

*"There is a clarity, a brilliance to space that simply doesn't exist on Earth, even on a cloudless summer's day in the Rockies, and from nowhere else can you realize so fully the majesty of our Earth and be so awed at the thought that it's only one of untold thousands of planets."*
—Gus Grissom (from his posthumous 1968 book Gemini: A Personal Account of Man's Venture Into Space, p. 108)

From the mission transcript during the photograph:

002:59:41 Young: Man, just pitch over and I'll take a picture.
002:59:41 Young: Can you pitch it down and toward the States, Gus? [...]
003:00:03 Young: Can you come across a groundtracking looking down like that, Gus?
003:00:06 Grissom: Sideways?
003:00:07 Young: Yes, sideways, and pitch down 90. Will this hurt alignment? — because I can see some targets up north. [...]
003:00:57 Young: Here, there is a target down there.
003:00:59 Grissom: Where?
003:01:02 Young: You've got to pitch the nose down. Right by the nose.
003:01:07 Grissom: That green spot? (The Imperial Valley)
003:01:08 Young: No, down — like straight down.
003:01:11 Grissom: I don't know what you see.
003:01:12 Young: There's all kinds of stuff. See that town down there?
003:01:17 Grissom: Where?
003:01:18 Young: Right around here on the right.
003:01:20 Grissom: I can't see over there, John. I'll roll back to the right so we can both see. Ah yeah, there is one right down below here. Let's see if I can get it. [...]
003:02:36 Grissom: Got the pictures?
003:02:37 Young: Yes.
003:02:38 Grissom: That is right up from the tip of the Gulf of California, isn't it?
003:02:39 Young: Yes.
003:02:41 Grissom: I don't see the Salton Sea.