Apollo Remastered(kottke.org) |
Apollo Remastered(kottke.org) |
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
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?
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
If you're unable to find something you know should be there, a FOIA request should fill the gap.
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 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...
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.
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.)
nope it's the moon.
'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.'
> 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.
Why are they on flickr and not NASA.gov as usual?
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.
Every page is filled with these georgeous, highly detailed pictures, and a running commentary from the astronauts or author.
You won't be disappointed.
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.
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.
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.
>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
https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-laws-in-u-s-governme...
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.
[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/albums
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.
And on that page there's a download button for several version, with the raw image (the link has a .TIF extension) being 1.3 GB big...
