The Apollo Archives Hit Flickr, Total Awesomeness Ensues

People are creating all manner of mashups and remixes with the 8,400 high-res photos of the Apollo missions you can find on Flickr.
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Earlier this month, Kipp Teague of the Project Apollo Archive uploaded more than 8,400 high-res photos of NASA's lunar missions to Flickr, and they are of course totally awesome. No less awesome is what people are doing with all those photos.

The images, made by Apollo astronauts using mostly Hasselblads, are wonderfully imperfect—they aren't always in focus, and the exposure and framing often is off—but as with family snapshots, it's the content that matters. They remind us that anything is possible. All these years later, they still inspire.

Perhaps that is why the photos, which are free to all who want them, have spawned all manner of mashups and remixes. This wonderful stop-motion video by Vimeo user harrisonicus is a favorite. The clip, set to a frantic, video game-like soundtrack by Built By Snow, uses a stop-motion effect to take us from the launch pad to the moon in 2 minutes and 54 seconds.

"I was looking through the Project Apollo Archive and at one point, I began clicking through a series of pics quickly and it looked like stop motion animation," harrisonicus writes in the video's description. "So, I decided to see what that would look like without me having to click through it. Enjoy!"

Riffing on the Archive is becoming a full-on genre. Tom Kucy used Adobe Photoshop, After Effects and Audition to animate the stills to create the 2-minute 4K short film Ground Control. There's also Instagram user @elliepritts, who has been posting her trippy edits of the images, which you could say reimagines the astronauts as hipsternauts who prefer Holgas to Hasselblads.

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In a way, these re-imaginings of the Apollo missions are a type of fan art. The photos, unprocessed and copious in number, are pure fun for the imagination. While stop motion videos and filtered Insta-versions of historic moments might not seem like the obvious use for these images, spokesperson Sarah Ramsey says the folks at NASA couldn't be more pleased.

"We’re delighted that people are using our content in creative and innovative ways. All of our images are publicly available; we support their use for science, education and public engagement," she says. "These images will inspire the Mars generation to take on the new challenges of exploration on our journey there."