4 October 1957
Waxing Gibbous, 85% lit
Sputnik
The night the Space Age began, there was already an 87% moon up, the object everyone had been looking at for the previous four billion years.
Sputnik was visible from the ground as a moving star, and hundreds of thousands of people went outside to look. Twelve years later some of them watched a live broadcast from the surface of the older object.
- Date
- 4 October 1957
- Moon computed for
- 19:00 local time, UTC+3
- Phase
- Waxing Gibbous
- Illuminated
- 85%
Source: NASA history (opens in a new tab)