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This archival and contemporary Lunar Orbiter Photo retrieval story is about two classic images that changed our collective world views:

"There are two pictures that are iconic for somebody my age," said Keith Cowing, who was 11 at the time of Lunar Orbiter 1. "One is what LIFE magazine called the ‘view of the century’ which is the oblique shot of Copernicus crater taken by Lunar Orbiter 2 as I recall, and it was the picture of the century because up until then, I had never seen a sideways view of a mountain inside a crater on the Moon, nor had anybody else. That struck me that it was a world like Earth. It was almost like listening to what Galileo said about the fancible mountains of the Moon. This be the mountain!"

"And the other one of course, is earthrise, Earth rising above the surface of the Moon," continued Cowing in an interview with collectSPACE. "At the time, all the photos were either television or photographs that had been sent back and they were murky."

 

These images also reaffirm some of my recent thinking about data, infrastructure and imagination.  These images - data, the machines that took them + the media that stored them + the projects that surrounded them + the people who protected them over the years + the people who re-retrieved them + the organization + process to get them back - infrastructure, gave us back something that was new to imagine in 1965.  These lunar images and the later great blue ball images sparked a whole new way for us to see ourselves, to think of a borderless world, to imagine ourselves in space, to think about transboudary environmental issues, and most importantly reminded us that we are all in this together.

Via: Polymeme and Collect Space: Repaired Data Drives Restoring the Moon

And for a little extra, you can read this book online for free from the National Science Foundation in the US that will walk you through the first 50 years of space imagery:

Earth Observations from Space: The First 50 Years of Scien …
Read this FREE online! Full Book | PDF Summary | PDF Report Brief | Podcast