More than 8,000 high-resolution photos taken by astronauts during NASA's Apollo lunar landing missions are now available on image-sharing website Flickr.
The Project Apollo Archive on Flickr is the work of Kipp Teague, who spent a lot of time putting the photo collection together and uploading it to the popular site.
The Apollo Archive is hardly new: Teague started the collection of photographs in 1999 and put them up on a NASA companion website called the Lunar Surface Journal. However, putting the photographs up on Flickr gets them out to a larger audience, as well as offers Flickr users the opportunity to download high-resolutions of each image.
"The new gallery is a revisiting of the astronaut photos taken during the missions, and presented for the first time in an unprocessed, uncropped, highest available resolution format," wrote Teague as reported by The Digital Universe.
The Archive plans on having as many as 36,000 photos available on the Flickr account soon, opening up new avenues of research for students who may have an interest in the history of space exploration.
"I haven't considered the possibilities this opens for research and the like, but if the new gallery contributes to education on space history, that is wonderful," said Teague.
All photos are also downloadable, meaning that students and educators can use them in whatever projects they wish. Some users have already used photos by putting together interesting, creative pieces. One YouTube user collected many of the Apollo photographs and created a two-minute 4K short film called Ground Control.
One Instagram user, @elliepritts regularly posts edited versions of the photos, using filters popular with the photo-sharing website.
Although the Project Apollo Archive isn’t overseen by NASA, the agency itself encourages people to visit the archive on Flickr and approves of the more creative ways people use the images.
“We’re delighted that people are using our content in creative and innovative ways. All of our images are publicly available; we support their use for science, education and public engagement,” said NASA spokesperson Sarah Ramsey to Wired. “These images will inspire the Mars generation to take on the new challenges of exploration on our journey there.”
Photo: Project Apollo Archive | Flickr
