Andy Saunders - Apollo Remastered: The Ultimate Photographic Record

The original NASA photographic film from the Apollo missions is some of the most important and valuable film in existence. It is securely stored in a freezer, to help maintain its condition, in Building 8 at Johnson Space Center, Houston. It never leaves the building in fact, the film rarely leaves the freezer. The images it contains include the most significant moments in our history, as humankind left the confines of our home planet for the first time.

While the astronauts primary goal was to simply record their activities, they captured images that transcend documentation.

The photographs from the lunar surface are as close as we can get to standing on the Moon ourselves. The small cross-hairs on many of these images are synonymous with Apollo and an instant indicator that the photographs were taken in a scientific setting, where a documentary measuring tool of the utmost precision was required.

For the first time, we were able to look back at Earth from afar, experiencing the overview effect, the cognitive shift that elicits an intense emotional experience and mental clarity upon seeing our home planet from space for the first time. The Blue Marble photograph, taken as Apollo 17 set course for the Moon, depicts the whole sunlit Earth, and is the most reproduced photograph of all time. Along with Apollo 8s Earthrise, which depicts Earth above the lunar horizon, it was a catalyst for the environmental movement that continues today.

Many of these images from Apollo are so well known they are seared into our collective memory; they are visual artifacts produced by space explorers. The treasures they returned to Earth included 842lbs of Moon rock, and their film, exposed in the alien environment.

As the original flight film lay hermetically encapsulated in its frozen vault for half a century, almost all of the Apollo images made publicly available have been copies of master duplicates, or copies of copies, leading to the gradual degradation in the quality of the images we see. This process has only accelerated with the prevalence of digital representations of these images online.

In recent years, however, the original film for each mission has been removed from the freezer, thawed, cleaned, and digitally scanned to an unprecedented resolution. There is a huge treasure trove of around 35,000 photographs, the vast majority of which are rarely seen, in part due to the quality or exposure of the original film. Its easy to forget that they were taken in an era when photography was purely analog, requiring light-sensitive chemistry, film and paper. Since the film was designed for analog mediums, digital scans of the transparencies are often chronically underexposed and difficult to process. As a result, many of the photographs from early spaceflight, including some of the most important images in our history, are typically poorly represented.

The images in this book are derived from the new, high-resolution raw scans of the original flight film. I have painstakingly restored and remastered them utilizing image-enhancement technology and techniques to present them in unprecedented detail and clarity. Having inspected all 35,000 images in NASAs archive, I have selected those which most effectively represent the Apollo program, in addition to a select few from the preceding Mercury and Gemini missions, which helped pave the way.

The actual photographic content of alien landscapes and apparently complex, unfamiliar machinery and technology benefits hugely from the inclusion of familiar human forms to help us interpret and connect with the images. Rarely, however, do astronauts appear in mission photographs; NASAs objective was not the idolization of the select few humans doing the work, but the work itself. Project Gemini missions included the Hasselblad Superwide Camera (SWC). Its wide-angle capability was well suited to capturing the whole spacecraft from close quarters and a good coverage of Earths surface, but equally the inside of the cramped capsule itself and its space-faring inhabitants.