NASA Opens Space Image Library

slatterz writes with an excerpt from a brief PC Authority article: "NASA is to make its huge collection of historic photographs, film and video available to the public for the first time. A partnership with the non-profit Internet Archive will see 21 major NASA imagery collections merged into a single searchable online resource. The NASA Images website is expected to go live this week. The content of the site covers all the diverse activities of America's space program, including imagery from the Apollo missions, Hubble Space Telescope views of the universe and experimental aircraft past and present." The site is working already, and it looks fantastic. Don't hesitate to share any interesting pictures or movies you find.

Comments

hopefully they'll start from the beginning

[beanerspace]

This is great, my only hope is that they start with the older stuff first.

I've got some old 8x10's my father would bring home - he was an engineer at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center from the beginning of the space race through to the Jupiter probe.

Now I have these wonderful images I can share with my young daughter of what an old computer looks like and the slide-ruled people who ran them.

I know I'm gushing, but this is going to be great in so many ways, as along with some spectacular shots of space - we'll also see down-to-earth images of the culture at the time that cannot be expressed even in 1000 words.

Re:hopefully they'll start from the beginning

[Teancum]

My father worked as a photographer for a NASA (& DOD) contractor and had access to a rather large set of high resolution photos that came from space as well. One of them was a high resolution image of the whole Earth taken at the Equator that shows nearly the entire western hemisphere. I think it was likely a weather satellite photo, but the resolution is simply outstanding as it is an actual photograph.

This photo, BTW, is now above my son's bed and has become a family heirloom.

My only regret was that I didn't get any more of those images, but in defense of my father a great many of those images were classified secret or top secret. I'm amazed what he brought out of that place and showed me as it was.

Rover tracks

[CmdrSammo]

I really like this image showing the rover tracks leading back to the Apollo 14 Lunar Module "Antares".

How anyone can look at this image in particular and claim the landings were faked is beyond me. It's a wonderful image, let's just hope we'll be back there soon to take more!

Poor image quality on more recent images

[Coolhand2120]

These images are amazing! I'm curious why all the 'newer' images are always low quality (small). I know they have larger, higher quality images, and I've seen some of the larger images on the JPL and NASA site, however, the large images are usually older missions and there are quite a few poor images, Mars rover mission for instance, that are obviously smaller versions of the original. I hope I'm mistaken and these full resolution images are available, but I've looked pretty good and can't seem to find them, so if there there it's not obvious where they are. Can anyone enlighten me?

Apollo 11 and 17 Landing Videos

[florescent_beige]

I browsed quickly through the site and didn't see any video.

Two of my very favorite things to watch, and I could literally sit and watch them over and over for weeks are the Apollo 11 and 17 landing videos.

NASA has placed online full video libraries for both Apollo 11 and Apollo 17. *

The actual Apollo 11 landing is here (16 minutes).

The actual Apollo 17 landing is here (4 minutes).

The Apollo 17 video will send shivers up and down your spine I guarantee it.

* Most unfortunately, the videos are in Quicktime(tm) format. If you, like me, use Windows, go here to get Quicktime. If you have NoScript, disable it for that page because there is a script that autodetects your OS. Download the most basic player and uncheck all options because Apple tries to install all sorts of incredibly annoying nag- and crap-ware. Also make sure you do not select auto-update because thats another level of nagging to upgrade to a paid service. Finally, use Spybot to disable the Apple updater in your startup list.