Good news for all you space geeks out there — The Project Apollo Archive, with assistance from NASA, last week released thousands of images from the agency’s historic Apollo missions. The albums contain 8,400 high-resolution, unprocessed versions of the original scans owned by NASA and released publicly for presentation on Flickr. Each photo is grouped into the mission film magazines in which they were exposed.
Speaking to The Planetary Society, Apollo Archive founder Kipp Teague says that every lunar surface photo is included in the archive along with numerous Hasselblad photos taken from the Earth, the moon and during the journey back. Johnson Space Center began reprocessing the original NASA scans in 2004 and provided the images to the Apollo Project in TIFF format. After scaling them down for his website, Teague decided to re-release them and other photos he obtained third-party sources in a higher-resolution, unedited format (1800 dpi) for the Flickr gallery.
Many of the photos were taken by the astronauts themselves, capturing both mission highlights such as walking on the moon and mundane moments like shaving in space. Some photos will stun you with their clarity while others are delightfully blurry. It’ s like stepping into someone’s personal photo collection, except all the photos were taken in space. The gallery is a treasure trove of imagery that’ll thrill both space and history fans alike.
The Project Apollo Archive was started by Kipp Teague in 1999 as both an online reference source and digital image repository for NASA’s historic Apollo manned lunar landing program. The Project Apollo Archive is a companion to Eric Jones’ Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, which provides an online journal chronicling the daily events of every Apollo lunar mission.
