261 a
The crew took this photograph through the 250mm telephoto lens.

“You begin to see and realize after a period of time that the Earth’s rotating, because the continents are beginning to change places. And the second day, now you’ve been looking at the Earth, it’s become quite small and continues to get smaller, but very slowly does it continue to get smaller,” remembered Eugene Cernan (Chaikin, Voices, p. 25).

043:45:31 Lousma (Mission Control): And we’re tracking you guys out there now at 154,221 miles, and you have slowed down to 300 - 3,000 - correction 3,853 feet per second. [...]
043:49:32 Cernan: Jack, here comes the world. Looking right over Suez Canal, Saudi Arabia, the Mediterranean, Africa, back into the parts of Europe.
043:50:04 Lousma (Mission Control): Houston. Roger. [Long pause.]
043:50:53 Cernan: Jack, right now I’m looking at all of Africa, which is almost totally clear with the exception of a few clouds on the western side. I can see across the Straits of Gibraltar, some cloud cover just on the eastern side of the Straits. I can see Spain which is totally clear, Portugal, almost all of the Mediterranean except the north - northwest corner of the Med, Greece, Crete, Turkey, Italy. They all look clear from here. Saudi Arabia, back up into the Soviet Union, is partially clear in great areas and actually almost back into parts of China where the terminator is, it’s just sort of partly cloudy. There appears to be a big, long, wide cloud swirl out into the Atlantic west of Spain. Generally, it looks like I can see Zanzibar. Generally, it looks like that whole portion of Africa and eastward – northeastward - is pretty clear today.
043:52:02 Lousma: Roger. Thank you, Gene, for the weather report.
043:52:11 Cernan: And - and it’s a magnificent sight, Jack. Beautiful.

261 b
The photograph was taken through the 250mm telephoto lens.

“You say, Hey, I’m out here 150 or 200 thousand miles away from home,” said Eugene Cernan. “It’s not like you’re on a trip from Houston to California. I mean you have really left society” (Chaikin, Voices, p. 19).

From the mission transcript as the crew was sending a TV transmission to Earth from about 175,000 nautical miles away:

053:43:53 Stafford: Charlie, we are full zoom on you and it’s even hard for us to make out things with the naked eye unless we know where they are. So, I imagine it is going to be difficult for you.
053:44:02 Duke (Mission Control): Roger.
053:44:03 Stafford: Okay, Charlie. The total globe that you see there is bigger than what we actually see, since we have the zoom lens on and it is probably about one and one quarter times as big as we see it.
053:44:17 Duke: Copy, 10. As I said earlier, we are primarily getting the globe on a black background, and we see the white of the clouds and the blues of the sea with an occasional glimpse of what I make out as landmasses in the brownish. But, it is really difficult for an untrained eye to pick out the exact landmasses. We are sitting here with the inpad
book that – We got it to show the various sizes and with this diagram, it is a big help.
053:45:05 Young: What you are saying, Charlie, is that we are too far away to give you a good picture.
053:45:08 Duke: Boy, you sure are a long way away.