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by dabluecaboose 1103 days ago
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

3 comments

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.

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)

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

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...

Do you know what the crosses in the images are?