Unique Photos of the Apollo Mission From NASA

We’ve all seen plen­ty of pho­tos from the Apol­lo mis­sions, includ­ing some icon­ic space pho­tos. But nev­er before has the Apol­lo archive down­loaded so many high-res­o­lu­tion images at the same time. More than 8,400 high-res­o­lu­tion images tak­en by lunar astro­nauts dur­ing NASA mis­sions in the 1960s have been post­ed. The col­lec­tion includes all pho­tographs of the lunar sur­face tak­en by astro­nauts with their Has­sel­blad chest cam­eras, along with numer­ous Earth and Lunar orbit shots. All pho­tos are raw orig­i­nal ver­sions.

While the Flickr album only appeared a few days ago, the pho­to dig­i­ti­za­tion process began over fif­teen years ago. Around 2004, John­son Space Cen­ter began res­can­ning the orig­i­nal film from the Apol­lo cam­eras, sav­ing high-res­o­lu­tion, uncom­pressed pho­tos on DVD. Man­aged the Apol­lo Archive project Kipp Teague. These images were processed for post­ing on NASA web­sites — col­or and bright­ness lev­els were opti­mized, and the size was reduced to 1000 dpi for high-res­o­lu­tion ver­sions.

Unlike many images from the Apol­lo mis­sions that have been released to the pub­lic to date, the recent Flickr selec­tion does­n’t just include the very best pho­tos. The pic­tures were not processed in Pho­to­shop and did not change. Many of them are blur­ry and vague, but that’s the beau­ty of it. “View­ing the entire col­lec­tion evokes the feel­ing of look­ing through an old fam­i­ly pho­to album,” the Plan­e­tary Soci­ety wrote. Here are a few pho­tographs, select­ed by me accord­ing to per­son­al sym­pa­thies.