Author Topic: Just released NASA 8,400 Apollo Mission Photos  (Read 12717 times)

Offline Davp99

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Just released NASA 8,400 Apollo Mission Photos
« on: 10/05/2015 10:41 pm »
https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/page1

Not sure of where to post this  Dave P
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Offline the_other_Doug

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Re: Just released NASA 8,400 Apollo Mission Photos
« Reply #1 on: 10/06/2015 01:53 am »
Wow!  These appear to be high-resolution scans of literally every image exposed on every Hasselblad film magazine on every mainline Apollo flight.  Only about 60% of these images have been available in such high resolution in the past, though about 85%, I would guess, of the lunar surface imagery has been available up to now in high res.

This is a massive posting by Kipp Teague, whose excellent Project Apollo Archive website has to now been the best repository of these images, plus other imagery taken of the equipment development, construction, preparation, etc., as well as pictures of crew training and other miscellaneous related things.

It seems Kipp has gathered up all of the high-res Apollo in-flight imagery (at least, the Hasselblad images -- on Apollo 17, there is a collection of imagery taken with a 35mm camera brought along as an experiment on how well the smaller film size performed that isn't included here) and posted it all to this set of Flickr albums.

Now, it seems, I'm going to have to go through the roughly 1,200 Apollo images I have cleaned up, manipulated and formatted for my wide monitor screen, and see which things that are not essentially duplicates I can now access in high res.  Looking forward to a year or two of upgrading my personally cropped and tweaked Apollo collection!

:D  :D  :D
-Doug  (With my shield, not yet upon it)

Offline tyrred

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Re: Just released NASA 8,400 Apollo Mission Photos
« Reply #2 on: 10/06/2015 05:56 am »
Simply amazing... Even the "imperfect" shots perfectly document the humanity of the otherworldly adventure those brave men pioneered.

I almost feel sorry for the hoaxers out there who now have access to even more mind-blowing evidence to ignore and misinterpret ... almost, but not quite.

Offline MattMason

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Re: Just released NASA 8,400 Apollo Mission Photos
« Reply #3 on: 10/06/2015 12:16 pm »
Oh, my.

This is a modeler's dream come true. Short of taking close-ups of actual flight-capable hardware (like I did with a passion while at the NASM last October of LM 2) this is a great and welcome new compilation.
"Why is the logo on the side of a rocket so important?"
"So you can find the pieces." -Jim, the Steely Eyed

Offline Blackstar

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Re: Just released NASA 8,400 Apollo Mission Photos
« Reply #4 on: 10/06/2015 01:37 pm »
Why are so many of the images hazy?

Offline sghill

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Re: Just released NASA 8,400 Apollo Mission Photos
« Reply #5 on: 10/06/2015 03:01 pm »
Here are some of my favorites (mostly from Apollo 17).

Bring the thunder!

Offline Star One

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Just released NASA 8,400 Apollo Mission Photos
« Reply #6 on: 10/06/2015 03:12 pm »
Simply amazing... Even the "imperfect" shots perfectly document the humanity of the otherworldly adventure those brave men pioneered.

I almost feel sorry for the hoaxers out there who now have access to even more mind-blowing evidence to ignore and misinterpret ... almost, but not quite.

Believe me it is already being discussed by such characters. But let us say no more on that issue.
« Last Edit: 10/06/2015 03:12 pm by Star One »

Offline Davp99

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Re: Just released NASA 8,400 Apollo Mission Photos
« Reply #7 on: 10/06/2015 05:39 pm »
Some great LEM Photos that I never saw before..Nice that they have from what mission at the bottom on each.
You Only Live Twice

Offline woods170

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Re: Just released NASA 8,400 Apollo Mission Photos
« Reply #8 on: 10/06/2015 09:59 pm »
Why are so many of the images hazy?
What letter of the word unprocessed did you not understand?  Did you honestly think that each exposed frame had perfect settings?  Hell no. Over-exposure and glare were more of a rule than the exception.

Offline Blackstar

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Re: Just released NASA 8,400 Apollo Mission Photos
« Reply #9 on: 10/06/2015 10:19 pm »
Why are so many of the images hazy?
What letter of the word unprocessed did you not understand?



Whoa! Down boy!
« Last Edit: 10/06/2015 10:20 pm by Blackstar »

Offline iamlucky13

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Re: Just released NASA 8,400 Apollo Mission Photos
« Reply #10 on: 10/07/2015 12:53 am »
It appears to me these are not actually newly released, but rather newly copied to Flickr from the Project Apollo Archive.

http://www.apolloarchive.com/

Offline npuentes

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Re: Just released NASA 8,400 Apollo Mission Photos
« Reply #11 on: 10/07/2015 01:15 am »
Are there additional crew training photos, or are all of these released inflight?

Offline the_other_Doug

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Re: Just released NASA 8,400 Apollo Mission Photos
« Reply #12 on: 10/07/2015 03:22 am »
It appears to me these are not actually newly released, but rather newly copied to Flickr from the Project Apollo Archive.

http://www.apolloarchive.com/

Yes, but some of them have never been available at that website in the high resolution versions now available.  And there were a couple of magazines from some missions, mostly hand-held Hasselblad shots of the surface from orbit, that were never available except as thumbnails.

PS -- a little easy processing with even a basic photo editing package will reduce the haze.  There are some images that acquired a bit of a background haze in the scanning process, though, I think.
-Doug  (With my shield, not yet upon it)

Offline Blackstar

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Re: Just released NASA 8,400 Apollo Mission Photos
« Reply #13 on: 10/07/2015 06:41 pm »
There are some images that acquired a bit of a background haze in the scanning process, though, I think.

Having worked with photo negatives and photo positives before, including large format ones, that is also my impression.

Offline Jester

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Re: Just released NASA 8,400 Apollo Mission Photos
« Reply #14 on: 10/08/2015 04:17 pm »
right...first things first, its great NASA is releasing these images... now for some questions...

- why are they using flickr ? downloading them and keeping the original names is going to be "fun"

- what is the source ? (scanned copies ?) as these seem different from my own archive EDIT: Unprocessed from JSC apparently

example below....
« Last Edit: 10/08/2015 04:23 pm by Jester »

Offline Blackstar

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Re: Just released NASA 8,400 Apollo Mission Photos
« Reply #15 on: 10/08/2015 04:30 pm »
- why are they using flickr ? downloading them and keeping the original names is going to be "fun"

Earlier this year NASA made a big transition to flickr (it could have started before then, but I think most of the transition has been in the past year). They've gotten rid of a lot of their gallery sites and if you go to their main NASA page and then click on some of their gallery links you'll find links to websites that have not been updated in a long time.

I know somebody who works at NASA and has to find images of what is happening around the agency to use in publications and things and they hate this move to flickr. They said that it's essentially impossible to search on flickr and it actually has less flexibility and fewer options than the dedicated photo gallery sites that the agency had set up before, like no data on the photos, no links to higher-res versions, etc. Why did they do it? Dunno, but probably somebody thought that this would make their photos more accessible, just like stores make their merchandise more accessible by throwing them into giant piles on the floor.

Offline DaveS

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Re: Just released NASA 8,400 Apollo Mission Photos
« Reply #16 on: 10/08/2015 04:51 pm »
It isn't NASA that has released these images. It's Kipp Teague of The Project Apollo Archive that has uploaded these images. And I do agree Blackstar fully. Previously the images always had nice IDs in the file names making archiving them easy. But now that they're on Flickr, all they have is some completely random alphanumerical ID. My guess is that someone at NASA HQ who is 100% into social media thought that NASA must have a photo collection some of the many social media connected image hosting sites in order to "reach out" to the general public and to have a semblance of "coolness".

I don't think this will end until that "someone" at NASA HQ decides to come down from the "social media" high and regain their sanity and realize that things were better in the past.
"For Sardines, space is no problem!"
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Offline Blackstar

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Re: Just released NASA 8,400 Apollo Mission Photos
« Reply #17 on: 10/08/2015 04:59 pm »
My guess is that someone at NASA HQ who is 100% into social media thought that NASA must have a photo collection some of the many social media connected image hosting sites in order to "reach out" to the general public and to have a semblance of "coolness".

Yeah, that is probably the explanation. The problem is that somebody established "ease of use" as a top priority, and then defined it in terms of being on a social media website. Other things like accuracy, resolution, metadata, ability to search, captions and things like that were essentially tossed aside. I've heard that there are a few holdout NASA center websites that put their images out the old fashioned way. That means that although they're not on flickr, once you are at the website with the images they all have great data and captions and stuff. But they're now the exception not the rule and a lot of NASA photo content has actually disappeared, even for somebody who is at NASA itself and needs to locate it.

Offline Blackstar

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Re: Just released NASA 8,400 Apollo Mission Photos
« Reply #18 on: 10/09/2015 05:08 pm »
Good overview trying (in vain, alas) to set the record straight: the images are not being released by NASA, they're not new, and they're not previously unseen:

http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-100815a-apollo-moon-photos-flickr.html


Offline woods170

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Re: Just released NASA 8,400 Apollo Mission Photos
« Reply #19 on: 10/09/2015 05:32 pm »
Good overview trying (in vain, alas) to set the record straight: the images are not being released by NASA, they're not new, and they're not previously unseen:

http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-100815a-apollo-moon-photos-flickr.html


And also confirming what I stated earlier: not all of the exposed film had perfect settings.
Remember that back in those days setting the focus and exposure was all done manually, mostly by educated guessing. The astronauts were not professional photographers and they didn't use any other optical aides other then eyeball Mk. 1. They were also not very well trained with regards to using still-photo cameras. Otherwise the Apollo-14 moonwalkers never would have come up with the idea of exposing a frame of Antares directly looking into the sun (to name just one example).
The result is a good number of optimally exposed frames and a much larger number of not-so-optimally exposed frames.
I'm amazed that folks here apparently find this surprising.

Over the years I've had the privilege of talking to three folks doing the images for books on space-subjects. All three confirmed that much of the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab and early STS in-flight imagery required significant amounts of clean-up and processing to turn them into something presentable.

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