A Book Featuring Historic Apollo Photos is On the Way

Last year, Kipp Teague released thousands of super high-resolution images from NASA’s Apollo moon missions on Flickr as part of the Project Apollo Archive. The collection offered an unprecedented look at humankind's photographic experience on the moon.

That got a small group of graphic designers and art directors in Amsterdam thinking: Why wasn’t there a book of these historic and majestic shots? Soon, there will be. The team just ran a successful Kickstarter to fund a coffee table book called Apollo: VII – XVII that will feature large prints of the photos.

The book will highlight the missions chapter by chapter, and serve as a tip of the hat to the astronauts who became sudden professional photographers as they documented the historic trips. They had to be the first to learn what it was like to take photographs in zero gravity, and were the first to use cameras like the space-modified Hasselblad 500 EL.

As NASA photography expert Richard W. Underwood once told astronauts: "You know, when you get back, you're going to be a national hero ... But those photographs, if you get great photos, they'll live forever. Your key to immortality is in the quality of the photographs and nothing else."

The photos will have some minor modifications: While the team writes on the fundraising page that they aim to “stay as true to the original photographs as possible,” they do plan to remove dust particles and scratches, as well as color grade the images. In total, the tome will be at least 300 pages. To gaze at a few of the images and learn more, watch the video above and swing on over to Kickstarter.

Banner image via Kickstarter.

[h/t Kottke]