NASA has released around 13,000 images of the manned Apollo missions that took place between 1961 and 1972 to Kipp Teague, who oversees the Project Apollo Archive.
Teague told the BBC that "serious budget cuts" meant the organization doesn"t have the resources to publish them, so he has gone ahead and done it himself on flickr. Teague launched the gallery in 1999, but following questioning about decisions to edit some images in the past, he was asked to post unedited, high resolution images this time around. He said:
"Many times over the years I"ve been asked if I can make them available in a more user-friendly way. I felt it was time to get the full resolution, unprocessed versions out there,"
The final batch of images were collected over the last "four or five years" of the Apollo era and range from Earth and moon orbits to iconic shots of moonwalks. At the moment there are around 8,500 images in the archive, but Teague hopes to have all 13,000 shots online by the end of this week.
The images are now available on flickr in several albums sorted per mission, or as a photostream here.
Source: BBC Newsbeat | Images via NASA