Apollo Lunar Missions

Inspired by a book I recently read 'Apollo Remastered' in which the author obtained and processed high resolution images of NASA's archived pictures from the Apollo Missions to the moon, I searched and discovered that there have been recent projects to re-scan the original film media with modern equipment, including one project between NASA and Arizona State University. Prior to this, published images relied on older scanning equipment, sometimes from the original media, sometimes from a duplicate or duplicate of a duplicate of the media. In contrast, these source files were scanned in the 2007-2009 timeframe using more modern equipment to extract as much detail as possible from the original film.

The Apollo astronauts carried Hasselblad cameras with high quality optics and shot multiple roles of color and black and white 70mm film. Upon return, the film was duplicated and the originals ultimately frozen for preservation. The recent project with NASA and ASU included retrieving and thawing the film, scanning at 1800 DPI at 14 bits per channel and making the TIF media publicly available. Unlike jpg files that are limited to 8 bits per channel, TIF files can hold more depth, in this case, 14 bits per channel, which gives greater control in preserving shadow and highlight details while processing high contrast images.

I downloaded a few favorite RAW TIF files and processed them in Photoshop by adjusting exposure, levels, applied light sharpening, de-noising and cropping the composition. The results are shown below. Credit attribution to NASA, the astronauts and members of the team that made these scans possible. The bottom three images are from a different source, and are made from jpg files at Project Apollo Archive scans.

For more information, including access to the raw TIF scanned files, visit:

• Apollo archive casts new light

• Apollo image files

• About the scans

• Project Apollo Archive

© 2025 John Miranda