It’s like Xmas in October –and no, I ain’t talking about my birthday– thanks to the release of THOUSANDS of high-resolution photographs taken by NASA during the age of the Apollo missions, between 1961 and 1972.
Those images were taken by the Apollo astronauts using Hasselblad 500EL data cameras, equipped with special IMAX-like, 70mm thin-based film produced by Kodak, which is the equivalent of 12,000 lines of digital resolution –the perfect excuse to finally get that new iMac with 5k Retina display next Black Friday!
Project Apollo Archive, which contains over 8400 pics in total, is being curated by Kipp Teague, who founded it since 1999.
“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,” Teague tells 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.” Because there was so much demand for higher-resolution versions, Teague decided to reprocess the entire set and upload them to Flickr magazine by magazine.
[NOTE: These are **not** the best-resolution versions available on the archive]
Teague hopes to further expand the archive to 13,000 by the end of this week –but you can start looking for the wires on the lunar landing’s movie set right now!