Apollo Remastered

[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?

[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

[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..

[evolve2k]

Ha fully expected to read more about the reddit saga.

[nivekney]

oh they are finally replacing the reddit backend with their own!?

nope it's the moon.

[akiselev]

I believe all of the new scans are available here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/albums

[netsharc]

These look like to be the non-enhanced scans. Compare https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/217878648... and https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/70f4b600092729ee3a719066227d7... (from the article https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/aug/26/apollo-space... )

[TylerE]

Those date from 2019, so clearly not. The quality of the few I sampled is also nothing special.

[porphyra]

And best of all, like other works of the US government, it's public domain!

[hex4def6]

> 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.

[_caw]

I highly recommend this book, which I received as a birthday present (hint, for your friends or loved ones who are into space stuff.)

Every page is filled with these georgeous, highly detailed pictures, and a running commentary from the astronauts or author.

You won't be disappointed.

[WirelessGigabit]

> Inspected, embossed and hand signed by the artist

What? Since when is a film developer an artist?

If he would've taken the photos himself and then did the post-processing... fine. But not like this.

I'm reading this page: https://www.apolloremastered.com/shop/p/s65-30427 and it doesn't even mention the original photographer.

[gmiller123456]

>Since when is a film developer an artist?

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.

[Arainach]

A number of these shots are composites from multiple source images.

Photo editing is an art and a technical skill all on its own. A print with a separate photographer and editor has two artists, not one.

[jjcm]

Is there a link to the high res photos?

[KleinDisk]

Following the links throughout the thread, I've not seen a description of how the remastering process worked.

>The scans of this original flight film have been digitally remastered in a lossless format and then converted to laser / LED light

"Lossless encoding" is a red herring if you are looking for fidelity to ground truth, see:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22802909

amongst others

[clnq]

What other historically or culturally significant coffee table books would you recommend?

[grout58]

That's not what I expected to see :)