To date, 11,661 public domain images have been posted to the Project Apollo Archive. The incredible high-resolution photos contained in its 88 albums were taken during every manned mission to the Moon, both on the way there and back, and include never-before-seen images of the Moon landing. The archive contains every photo taken on the Moon’s surface.
The Project Apollo Archive serves as an online reference source and repository of digital images pertaining to the historic manned lunar landing program. It was first created by Kipp Teague, Director of Administrative Systems and Network Services in Information Technology & Resources at Lynchburg College, in February 1999 as a companion Web site to his “Contact Light” personal retrospective on Project Apollo and the era of the space race. The Archive also serves as a companion to Eric Jones‘ comprehensive Apollo Lunar Surface Journal.
A subsequent collaboration between the Archive and Eric Jones’ Apollo Lunar Surface Journal led to acquisition over the years of countless historic Apollo and other space history images provided by NASA and others for processing and hosting on the NASA-hosted Journal, as well as on Teague’s site.
“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,” he recently told The Planetary Society. “These images were processed for inclusion on our Web sites, including adjusting color and brightness levels, and reducing the images in size to about 1000 dpi (dots per inch) for the high-resolution versions.”
“Contrary to some recent media reports, the new Flickr gallery is not a NASA undertaking, but an independent one, involving the re-presentation of the public domain NASA-provided Apollo mission imagery as it was originally provided in its raw, high-resolution and unprocessed form by the Johnson Space Center on DVD-R and including from the center’s Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth Web site,” Teague explains. “Processed images from a few film magazines to fill in gaps were also obtained from the Lunar and Planetary Institute’s Apollo Image Atlas.”
Organized by mission, all mission photographs in the new gallery are courtesy of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, specifically the Johnson Space Center, with special thanks to Mike Gentry, as well as to Steve Garber of the NASA History Office. Eric Jones also dedicated countless hours to building and curating the exhaustive Apollo Lunar Surface Journal Web site. Teague is careful to note that the new Flickr gallery would not have been possible without the support of Gentry, Garber and Jones, as well as many others over the years.
In celebration of the new Flickr gallery, The Planetary Society has also put together a video showing the Apollo 11 Mission’s journey to the moon and back using images made available in the Project Archive (music by State Azure, images by NASA).
