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Comment by ajnin | Hacker News Reader

The raw recovered files seems to be available here, in any case : https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/lo/LO_1001/DATA/

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Go up a couple directories and get into the extras browse section I found PNGs instead of whatever 600mb files those were. https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/lo/LO_1001/EXTRAS/BROW...

Good find! Now if only there was a way to download them all at once...

That is what a good coding project is for! If you've got Python experience, or just want to have fun with it, BeautifulSoup can do exactly what you want. There might be Firefox plugins as well.

wget?

wget with wildcards is what we use to get biology data. Those are ftp sites, so some experimentation may be necessary to make it work with http...

What? No, it works fine with http out of the box. From the man page:

GNU Wget is a free utility for non-interactive download of files from the Web. It supports HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols, as well as retrieval through HTTP proxies.

I think the GP's uncertainty relates to download URL wildcards with HTTP. Unlike FTP, I don't believe that HTTP servers have to support your request to list all files in a directory.

Thankfully the particular website in question already spits out a file listing for you.

I wrote my first Python script to do it:

https://github.com/cdtinney/lunar-scrape

Full disclosure: it's slow and there's no progress feedback.

Yep! But you can browse them more easily in the PDS Image Atlas: https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/search/?fq=ATLAS_MISSION_NA...

Great find. It is unfortunate that the moonrise image most used as the example image from this project is missing from that archive. It is FRAME_1101_H2, and is not there. This is ironic as this image is the example image the grandparent used for their example for the images being moved.

Were you (or anyone) able to open any of those .img files?

They're raw greyscale pixel values. I was able to convert one with imagemagick:

convert -size 19992x16500 -depth 16 gray:FRAME_1005_H1.IMG out.png

The dimensions are specified in the .LBL files in the same directory, right at the end of the file.

Alternatively, NASA help links to IMG2PNG for windows: http://bjj.mmedia.is/utils/img2png/

You probably don't want to use these for casual viewing, as they are too big. Use the PNG files from the other link, especially the lowest resolution only to get the idea what is there:

To understand the .img files format refer to the corresponding .lbl file e.g.

    OBJECT         = IMAGE
      LINES        = 16500
      LINE_SAMPLES = 19992
      SAMPLE_TYPE  = LSB_UNSIGNED_INTEGER
      SAMPLE_BITS  = 16
    END_OBJECT     = IMAGE

Only one image in format like that is more than 600 MB!

Instead, the same in cca 100 KB:

https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/lo/LO_1001/EXTRAS/THUM...

To get some idea of how detailed it is, here's the crop of the 6 MB PNG version:

https://ibb.co/jjoe7y

Take a look at the top bar. The actual resolution (one small piece cropped from the full resolution) is:

https://ibb.co/hthLfJ

That's how astoundingly amazing the actual resolution is. You can see the grain of the film and the sharpness of the reference patterns. Note, that's the technology used in the spy satellites even more than 50 years ago, all without microprocessors which didn't exist!

Comparing with that, the actual shot of the moon surface is, at least in this sample, much less detailed than what the film was able to capture, the scanner to scan, the transmission circuits to transmit and the tape to store:

https://ibb.co/nLhsud

The black dot is maybe a piece of cosmic rays passing through the film.

And if you are just interested in the general look of the moon surface, try first:

https://www.google.com/moon/

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