To the moon and back

Working through 35,000 scans of Apollo moon mission imagery and 'remastering' the best is a massive job, but Andy Saunders did it magnificently, as Geoff Harris discovers

- Geoff Harris

When one considers the greatest achievement of the 20th century, the Apollo missions to the moon must be very strong contenders - unless you're one of those unhinged conspiracy theorists who believes it was all faked, but AP readers are much saner than that.

If the Apollo programme from 1968 to 1972 wasn't impressive enough, a vast body of still and video imagery was also taken by the astronauts up in space or on the lunar surface.

You'd think they would have enough to worry about, especially the crew of the troubled Apollo 13 mission, but some 35,000 images were taken on state-of-the-art cameras (for the time being), and subsequently stored in a frozen NASA vault in Houston. For half a century, almost every publicly available image of moon landings was produced from lower-quality copies of these originals. Now, however, expert image restorer Andy Saunders has painstakingly worked on digital scans of this massive archive, bringing the original images to life as never before. His new book, Apollo Remastered, includes much more detailed shots of Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong from the first moon landing, Apollo 11, Jim Lovell and the Apollo 13 crew struggling to get their stricken transit craft back in one piece, and much more. We caught up with Andy to find out more about this labour of love.

The right stuff

Andy begins by stressing that this project was never driven or funded by NASA. 'NASA has an open-source policy, so anyone can access the image scans. They are more than happy for people to work on them. I sent back the remastered versions of the scans to NASA, but it wasn't like I was contacted by them at the beginning. Nobody else was working up the images, including NASA. We had the holy grail of the super-high-resolution Apollo mission scans and they were just sitting there on a server!'