This depiction of Earth might be the first such image of our planet as seen from space. No human (as far as we know) had ever been to space at the time Henry De la Beche drew this. He’d started out illustrating the dinosaurs whose skeletons his neighbor, Mary Anning, had discovered, and then worked up through the scientific world until he’d founded the Geological Survey of Great Britain and served as the first director of the Museum of Practical Geology.
I first heard about this image from the noted visual medium of podcasting; it was discussed by Roderick and Jennings on a recent episode of The Omnibus Project about pictures of the Earth from space.
Maybe this is the first *accurate* image of Earth from space. It seems like globes might count as “what Earth looks like from space,” and they go back to 150 BCE. But this Earth and that globe look pretty different.