Earthrise from lunar surface during Apollo 12 mission. (Photo : NASA/JSC)
More than 8,400 high resolution photos that were taken by Apollo astronauts during missions to the moon from the 1960s to the 1970s are now readily available for viewing and even download.
Kipp Teague who is the creator of this massive image archive called the Project Apollo Archive, first began this project in 1999 where he uploaded new and unprocessed images of original NASA photograph scans to the image sharing service, Flickr.
Teague also reveals that photos that were captured on the surface of the moon were done so with Hasselblad cameras that are included in the current collection, along with Hasselblad images taken from Earth and the lunar orbit, as well as shots in between the journey to the moon and back to Earth.
As an information technology director who has been working with Apollo images for more than 15 years and counting, Teague's Project Apollo Archive has already become a supplement to the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal which revealed detailed stories and accounts of all the Apollo lunar missions.
According to Teague, in 2004, the Johnson Space Center began the process of re-scanning all the original photographs from the Apollo Hasselblad camera film magazines where they collected the TIFF versions of the new scans and placed them on DVD format. For high resolution versions, the images were processed to be uploaded online by adjusting color and brightness levels and reducing image sizes to 1000 dpi.
Over the years, Teague received many questions about the images which led him to reprocess the archive in unedited, higher resolutions, making the new images in 1800 dpi.
The special treatment about these new Flickr images is that these photographs have not been processed unlike the Project Apollo Archive and the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. The photos appear washed out, possessing eerie, blurry qualities to them, revealing far away Earth, lunar vistas and memorable moonwalking photos.
Teague also notes that the Flickr gallery currently includes photos from the original Johnson Space Center scans which means there won't be any high resolution images from Apollo 8 and 13 missions yet, as NASA says that there were no lunar surface photography during those missions.
