A trove of 8,400 NASA photos from the moon missions has been posted online in its “raw, high-resolution, and unprocessed form.” Kipp Teague, of the Project Apollo Archive, an independent, non-NASA website, said he worked with NASA to obtain the public-domain Apollo mission imagery. Teague has collected images in a Flickr gallery from both the moon missions and from training operations on Earth. The collection includes original scans from the chest-mounted Hasselblad film cameras carried by the astronauts during their moon explorations. The archive has attracted massive traffic, with nearly a million views already, and has more than doubled Project Apollo’s Facebook followers over the last week.
Teague, an information technology director based in Lynchburg, Virginia, has been working with Apollo imagery for more than 15 years. “Around 2004, Johnson Space Center began re-scanning the original Apollo Hasselblad camera film magazines, and Eric Jones [editor of the online Apollo Lunar Surface Journal] and I began obtaining TIFF (uncompressed, high-resolution) versions of these new scans on DVD,” he told The Planetary Society. “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.” Teague said he has reprocessed the archive in unedited, higher resolution. The new images posted in the Flickr gallery are 1800 dpi.
