Thousands of pictures taken during NASA’s Apollo moon missions have been uploaded to Flickr courtesy of the Project Apollo Archive, meaning that the general public can now view images of these historic space missions – and in stunning 1800 dpi resolution, no less!
According to The Washington Post and The Verge, between 8,400 and 9,000 photographs were recently posted to the online media-hosting archive by Kipp Teague, who established the Project Apollo Archives back in 1999. The uploaded versions are rescanned, unprocessed versions of the original Apollo Hasseelblad camera film magazines, the media outlets noted.
Technological advances achieved since the Apollo photos were originally scanned left many of them looking fuzzy and pixilated, so in 2004, officials at the NASA Johnson Space Center began the tiresome, tedious tasks of obtaining better quality images, improving the quality of the moon mission photographs by obtaining uncompressed, high-resolution TIFF scans on DVD.
The images were originally processed for use on the Project Apollo Archive websites, Teague told The Planetary Society. However, due to the demand for the higher-resolution versions of the pictures, Teague and his colleagues decided to reprocess them and upload them to Flickr.
“An old family photo album” from outer space
Teague told The Planetary Society that every photo taken by astronauts using the Hasselblad cameras mounted to their chests has been uploaded to the account, as well as several more taken from orbit around the Earth and moon, and still others captured en route from one to the other.
The images have not been processed in any way, meaning that there will be some blurring and wash out in the images, and currently only photographs from the original Johnson Space Center scans are included. As such, the archive currently has no high-resolution images from Apollo 8 or Apollo 13 yet, The Planetary Society said, and looks like “an old family photo album.”
Teague added that he has requested additional images from NASA, but is not certain that the US space agency currently has enough the funding to provide more scans. However, he also pointed out that he has obtained processed versions of film magazines from Apollo 7, Apollo 9, Apollo 10, and Apollo 13 that he plans to upload in the near future.
As for the photos that are currently available, they speak for themselves. Since Hasseblads use film that is more than three times larger than a standard 35mm frame, these photos show craters in greater detail than ever before, and bits of propellant can even be seen in pictures of the lunar landing module’s separation from the orbiter, the website said.
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Feature Image: Project Apollo Archive
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