Apollo Remastered | Hacker News Reader

Apollo Remastered

kottke.org

88 pointsbentaber41 comments

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

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..

Not with that attitude, you can't.

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.)

> 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?

The intention of the post is to get people to buy photos/book (with a convenient amazon affiliate link) that should be free and in the public domain so yes, it is an ad.

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

Hundreds of hours of labor (and the hours developing professional skills prior to that labor) are not free. Art-grade photo printing is not free.

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 don't doubt the quality or the amount of effort put into it. I do feel, that since the photos are in the public domain, that the digital scans should also be in the public domain. I don't feel like paying $200 for remastered prints when I could pay $5 for good-enough-for-me prints

The digital scans are public domain [1] though I think you have to do a little digging on NASA.gov for the raw TIFF data. It's the remastered images made by Andy Saunders that aren't in the public domain. Anyone is free to make their own remastered versions and release those into the public domain (or make a competing book/print service)

[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/albums

This shop where I got my copy from is still selling them for 46 Euro a pop: https://www.buecher.de/shop/raumfahrt/apollo-remastered/saun...

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...

Do you know what the crosses in the images are?

https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/index.html

https://www.nasa.gov/missions

https://images.nasa.gov/

If you're unable to find something you know should be there, a FOIA request should fill the gap.

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.

Ha fully expected to read more about the reddit saga.

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

nope it's the moon.

I've been very much hoping that Apollo and the rest just pivot to being amazing Lemmy/kbin clients, with multiple instances pre-configured to use. That would be the biggest coup of all. Which is exactly what I thought had happened when I saw a title of "Apollo Remastered".

'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.'

Same here, I clicked on the link so fast So far I really like lemmy/Kbin, but the content and mobile apps I sorely miss quality-wise.

A project 'tafkars' (The Api Formerly Known As..), pronounced 'tuff cars', has started that's designed to be a proxy for the reddit api that can be tied into lemmy etc. The idea being that all existing apps that rely on the reddit api can be redirected.

They are looking for contributors, either folks who know Rust or otherwise just happy to do some legwork sniffing around the reddit api.

https://github.com/derivator/tafkars/issues/1

A moon shot if you will…

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.

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

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

Is it? It's definitely not made immediately clear on their website: https://www.apolloremastered.com/the-project

Why are they on flickr and not NASA.gov as usual?

Not sure, but I checked the licenses of a couple of photos on flickr and they were public domain.

In the US, government organizations are not allowed to copyright their work. They can, however, obtain works that were copyrighted by someone else. But pretty much everything coming out of NASA is public domain, though they don't put a lot of effort into publicising that fact.

https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-laws-in-u-s-governme...

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

According to the author's bio [1], he was remastering photos of Neil Armstrong in 2019 for NASA for the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 so clearly the timing lines up. Multiple sources on NASA and elsewhere point to that Flikr gallery.

> 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.

[1] https://www.apolloremastered.com/bio

From that site: "The raw output from the digital scan of a 70mm Hasselblad frame, is a huge 1.3GB, 16-bit TIFF file. At approximately 11,000 pixels square, a single image would require a 12-foot x 12-foot computer monitor to display the whole image at standard resolution. "

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.

11,000 pixels / 72DPI = 152 inches = 12' 6". Math checks out.

Yep! I wonder if it is possible to get the original TIFF files from NASA?

I've commented[1] above that the high-res scans were done by ASU, for example the cover of the book is this scan: http://tothemoon.ser.asu.edu/gallery/Apollo/9/Hasselblad%205...

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...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36333601

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... )

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

>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.

Is there a link to the high res photos?

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

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

That's not what I expected to see :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com