Well it's a thinly veiled ad... and you can't really easily get digital copies - which somehow feels weird/wrong for space stuff. You typically can get that in full resolution directly from NASA.
Is the web interface representative of the final quality?
Even mildly zoomed in the image looks quite crummy and blurry. Fine for a postcard, but not to hang on you wall
It's also a bit weird that some dude manages to somehow get semi-exclusive access to photos made by the US gov't and can then charge hundreds of pounds for them
Jason Kottke has been curating links on the inter-tubes for twenty-five years (1998). He simply links to stuff he thinks other will find cool: the fact that some of those items are purchasable does not mean the post is an ad.
The intention of the post is to get people to buy photos/book (with a convenient amazon affiliate link) that should be free and in the public domain so yes, it is an ad.
I had written this comment almost verbatim before getting distracted at work.
There's gotta be some public-facing way to access these images. NASA wouldn't just let any jabroni access these highly guarded films to sell them, they have to have gotten something out of it for them (and by extension the public)
EDIT: Clarifying since it sounded like I was calling the guy a jabroni, didn't intend that
Hundreds of hours of labor (and the hours developing professional skills prior to that labor) are not free. Art-grade photo printing is not free.
The book is huge in all 3 dimensions. Nearly every page is a full-page photo print. It is a work of art, an artifact, and well worth the price. I love my copy.
I don't doubt the quality or the amount of effort put into it. I do feel, that since the photos are in the public domain, that the digital scans should also be in the public domain. I don't feel like paying $200 for remastered prints when I could pay $5 for good-enough-for-me prints
The digital scans are public domain [1] though I think you have to do a little digging on NASA.gov for the raw TIFF data. It's the remastered images made by Andy Saunders that aren't in the public domain. Anyone is free to make their own remastered versions and release those into the public domain (or make a competing book/print service)
> Digital scans of the transparencies are often underexposed and difficult to process. The images shown here are derived from new, high-resolution scans of the original film, painstakingly restored using image-enhancement technology.
I think the "jabroni" was hired to make the best quality reproduction out of these films for NASA's own archive, my guess was he probably negotiated a deal where he'd be allowed to publish these photos.
I do wonder if public domain means they must be accessible online too?
Edit: on the Guardian excerpt, the photo credits include ASU, I found this site which talks about their work thawing the films and doing high-resolution, high bitrate (e.g. 14-bit grayscale) scans: http://tothemoon.ser.asu.edu/about, and this site also offers about 26000 scans of the films.
But the ASU scans are still not enhanced, e.g. the cover of the book, AS09-24-3665 from:
Click "next image" to see the right half. You can see there's a lot of work to join the 2 images, remove the lens flare and to make the colors more true (I presume) to real life.
The site also offers downloads, the "raw version" of the source images is 2x332MB large.
Ads are someone being paid to write/publish about something. Are you claiming that’s happening here?
Also, I’m pretty sure a lot of the original photos are simply blurry (from motion) or slightly out of focus. Some of the other previews are much sharper.
Luckily photos don’t have to tack sharp to be great. In fact, many awesome photos (on or off planet) aren’t sharp at all. I don’t care at all about the obvious motion blur in this great photo, it even seems fitting: https://www.apolloremastered.com/shop/p/as11-36-5390
(Though I would agree, you picked one that would be greatly helped by being tack sharp and where it being out of focus detracts from it. I still think the composition is great and that’s probably why it made it in.)
I've been very much hoping that Apollo and the rest just pivot to being amazing Lemmy/kbin clients, with multiple instances pre-configured to use. That would be the biggest coup of all. Which is exactly what I thought had happened when I saw a title of "Apollo Remastered".
'Oh, you're going to price us all out? You don't care about third party client users? That's fine, I guess you won't care if hundreds of thousands of users suddenly have a client for a different site installed when they go to open reddit.'
A project 'tafkars' (The Api Formerly Known As..), pronounced 'tuff cars', has started that's designed to be a proxy for the reddit api that can be tied into lemmy etc. The idea being that all existing apps that rely on the reddit api can be redirected.
They are looking for contributors, either folks who know Rust or otherwise just happy to do some legwork sniffing around the reddit api.
But yeah, I’d love for Apollo to do what some Twitter clients did switching to mastodon, it would make my transition off Reddit so much easier and nicer.
According to the author's bio [1], he was remastering photos of Neil Armstrong in 2019 for NASA for the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 so clearly the timing lines up. Multiple sources on NASA and elsewhere point to that Flikr gallery.
> The quality of the few I sampled is also nothing special.
The ones in the TFA are remastered - color correct among other things. The ones in the Flikr are the unprocessed versions of Apollo Hasselblad photography scanned by NASA's Johnson Space Center. You can download the original 4000x4000+ resolution scans from Flikr.
From that site: "The raw output from the digital scan of a 70mm Hasselblad frame, is a huge 1.3GB, 16-bit TIFF file. At approximately 11,000 pixels square, a single image would require a 12-foot x 12-foot computer monitor to display the whole image at standard resolution. "
The Flikr images must be jpg conversions of the original TIFFs, certainly in an attempt to reduce file sizes. I'm not sure where the 11,000 comes from. The JPGs are 4400x4600. Perhaps the original TIFFs were 11,000x11,000 pix.
In the US, government organizations are not allowed to copyright their work. They can, however, obtain works that were copyrighted by someone else. But pretty much everything coming out of NASA is public domain, though they don't put a lot of effort into publicising that fact.
> Inspected, embossed and hand signed by the artist
Wow, they got the Apollo 15 crew to sign these? Awesome! There are some technical / logistical issues with that, but I'm sure they managed to overcome them...
Snark aside, I'm not really sure how running restoration on public domain photographs gives you authorship / copyright ownership over them.
Developing and printing photographs absolutley is an art form. Many books on developing and printing are quick to point out that Ansel Adams was celebrated more for what he did in the dark room than for the subject matter or composition.
Is the web interface representative of the final quality?
Just looking at an example: https://www.apolloremastered.com/shop/p/as15-82-11056-to-110...
Even mildly zoomed in the image looks quite crummy and blurry. Fine for a postcard, but not to hang on you wall
It's also a bit weird that some dude manages to somehow get semi-exclusive access to photos made by the US gov't and can then charge hundreds of pounds for them