Surely, you have seen many images from the Apollo missions, including some of the most iconic space photos in history, but you've never seen anything like this before. Only a few hours ago, the Project Apollo Archive uploaded to Flickr more than 8,400 high-resolution images the moon astronauts took during NASA’s Apollo Missions of the 1960s. The collection includes every photo the astronauts took on the lunar surface with their chest-mounted Hasselblad cameras along with numerous other Hasselblad photos shot from Earth and lunar orbit, as well as during the journey between the two. All the photo are unprocessed versions of the original scans.
While the Flickr album is less than a day old, the process of digitizing the photos began more than fifteen years ago.
"Around 2004, Johnson Space Center began re-scanning the original Apollo Hasseelblad camera film magazines, and Eric Jones and I began obtaining TIFF (uncompressed, high-resolution) versions of these new scans on DVD," said Kipp Teague, the man behind Project Apollo Archive. "These images were processed for inclusion on our websites, including adjusting color and brightness levels, and reducing the images in size to about 1000 dpi (dots per inch) for the high-resolution versions."
Unlike many of the images from the Apollo missions released to the public till now, the recent set on Flickr was not handpicked to show only the best shots. Neither they were digitally processed. Because of this, you will find many washed out and blurry photos sitting alongside stunning lunar vistas and iconic moonwalking photos.
“Browsing the entire set takes on the feeling of looking through an old family photo album,” wrote The Planetary Society.
Here are some never before seen images from the collection.
via PetaPixel
It's interesting that many of these film images seem underexposed, creating that type of flat, washed-out appearance in film. I'm trying to imagine how truly dark ("low lighting") the environment really was. THANK YOU.
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