[contrarian1234]

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?

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

[throw0101b]

> Well it's a thinly veiled ad...

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.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Kottke

His posts on the Apollo program go back to 2005:

* https://kottke.org/tag/Apollo/3

Here's another post on a book you can purchase by Edward Tufte:

* https://kottke.org/01/09/edward-tufte-author-of-three

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Tufte

Was that post an ad?

[archerx]

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.

[dabluecaboose]

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

[toomuchtodo]

https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/index.html

https://www.nasa.gov/missions

https://images.nasa.gov/

If you're unable to find something you know should be there, a FOIA request should fill the gap.

[Arainach]

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.

[mcbutterbunz]

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

[akiselev]

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)

[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/albums

[netsharc]

This shop where I got my copy from is still selling them for 46 Euro a pop: https://www.buecher.de/shop/raumfahrt/apollo-remastered/saun...

I bought it after reading The Guardian's excerpt with a lot of great pictures: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/aug/26/apollo-space...

> 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:

- Flickr, 2015 upload: https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/217878648...

- ASU scan: http://tothemoon.ser.asu.edu/gallery/Apollo/9/Hasselblad%205...

- Apollo Remastered (Andy Saunder's work) - but with the Guardian's JPEG compression: https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/70f4b600092729ee3a719066227d7...

Wow I just noticed the download link on the ASU page, it offers a raw download of that single image which is about 1.3 GB...

[creativenolo]

Do you know what the crosses in the images are?

[netsharc]

Here's the highres scan of the left half of that image: http://tothemoon.ser.asu.edu/gallery/Apollo/15/Hasselblad%20...

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.

[arrrg]

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.

Check out the beard: https://www.apolloremastered.com/shop/p/as07-04-1596

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.)

[_caw]

That must be a web quality pic.

The ones in his book are far higher quality. Too bad I can't nail the book to my wall..

[aerio]

Not with that attitude, you can't.