Frame by frame.
Every photograph in the shop is restored from the best surviving source: NASA’s scans of the original film where they exist, and its processed mission images where they do not. We restore them for their beauty, not to show what software can do.
Three Inches a Second
The Agena target vehicle, seen from Gemini 8. The scan of the original film has a heavy blue-green cast, and the black of space reads as a murky teal. Restored, the cast is gone and the sky is black again, so the silver of the Agena and the thin blue line of Earth’s horizon stand out. The soft blur of the Gemini’s nose in the foreground stays, because that is how the photograph was taken.
See the photograph 02 of 07Nothing Holding Him
The scan has a dark blue haze over space. Restored, space is black again and the clouds below are crisp and white.
See the photograph 03 of 07Two Men in One Frame
A warm brown cast flattens the scan. Restored, the Moon is grey again, the shadows are deep and the visor reflection is clear.
See the photograph 04 of 07Seventy Bolts
The scan is pushed to red and magenta. Restored, the capsule, the hatch and the spacesuit return to their own colours.
See the photograph 05 of 07Both Boots Off the Ground
The scan leans yellow. Restored, the lunar surface is neutral grey and the sky behind the Lunar Module is black.
See the photograph 06 of 07The Flag That Fell
A faint colour cast and lifted blacks in the scan. Restored, the sky is black and the flag and spacesuit stand out.
See the photograph 07 of 07We Came In Peace
The scan is flat and dull. Restored, the gold foil and the ladder have depth again, and the plaque on the leg stands out.
See the photograph
Apollo VII-XVII
Starting from NASA’s scans of the original film, every photograph was carefully retouched for tone, colour and depth, and cleaned of dust and scratches. Everything else was left as it was scanned: the frame edges, the errors in film cutting and the small notes written on the film. They are part of each photograph’s story.
VOYAGER
Voyager sent its pictures home as data, 800 by 800 pixels, one colour filter at a time. For the book, Ted Stryk, Joel Meter and Delano Steenmeijer went back to the raw dataset. They corrected the warp of the cameras and the smear from the spacecraft moving, stacked the filter frames into colour images and joined frames into mosaics, so the pictures could be printed large for the first time.
True to the original
These are fine art photographs, and some of the most beautiful ever made. We restore them so you can see them as they were taken, not to show how far a picture can be pushed. We take away what the years added, dust, scratches and wear, and stop there. Nothing is painted in and nothing is exaggerated. Every photograph is listed with its date and mission, and with its photo code where NASA recorded one.
The mistakes stay
A flare of sunlight across the lens, a shadow falling over the frame, the blur of a hurried moment, the grain of the film. They belong to the moment the photograph was taken, so they stay in the print.
On film
The crewed missions from Mercury to the Space Shuttle flew film. Those photographs start from the latest digital scans of the original film rolls.
