Did you know that there are more than a thousand photos of Apollo astronauts on moon missions available on the internet right now? Close to 13,000 scans of all such images have been extracted from archives maintained by NASA. These mark all the Apollo missions carried out by various astronauts between years, 1961 and 1972. The current custodian of these thousands of photos, Kipp Teague (founder of the Project Apollo Archive) stated in his interview that budget constraints do not allow the organisation to publish these images. It turns out he took on that responsibility with sheer interest.
This image shows the crew belonging to the Apollo 9 commencing a spacewalk.
This image was shot while the Apollo 12 mission was in progress (following the first landing on the moon).
This image shows the Apollo 17 command module just over the surface of the moon.
This image demonstrates the view from the lunar orbit shot during the Apollo 15.
Back when all of this used to be hi-tech.
A window that literally showed the whole wide world.
Up close and personal with the surface of the moon.
The last manned Apollo mission to the moon with Apollo 17.
This one shows the first human footprints on the moon.
Images from the weather system that Apollo 11 crew supervised.
Images of the earthrise aka earthset.
Image of the Eartset captured by the crew aboard Apollo 17 (also Kipp’s all-time favourite).
Imagine if there was Instagram back in 1970s.
Neil Armstrong once he landed on the moon.
Kipp decided to launch the gallery of photos back in 1999. However, when questions started coming in about his decision to edit a few images put up, he was forced to upload original, high resolution photos. This was his way of presenting them in a more ‘user friendly’ manner. Kipp strongly believes that it was high time people saw the unprocessed, full resolution variants of images. The entire collection released this time around, comprising nearly 8,500 photos, is a collection put together for the past five years.
While Kipp continues his efforts to release more images to take the tally up to 13,000 images, he claims that he had no idea this would be so popular. He is delighted by the fact that people’s appetite for space history is still intact. While he loves almost every image that he has revealed to the world, Kipp is especially fascinated by one that demonstrates the dark moon surface with the background showing the setting Earth.
Kipp launched the gallery in corroboration with Eric Jones’ Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. He goes on to call it the ‘bible of the Apollo missions’. That is not surprising given how much history it contains within itself. You can check out rest of the photos on Flickr.
