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There is something uncanny about the bandwidth and quality of all the artifacts coming from this mission.

I've subsisted on photos from the Apollo missions and artistic renditions for so long that seeing the modern, high resolution real thing to be quite stirring in a way I didn't expect. It actually does make me believe that the future could be quite cool.

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We haven't even seen the full quality images yet. They've commented that the live feed from the GoPro is a limited bandwidth because they have to share the bandwidth with running the capsule. The images from the Nikons onboard are just scaled down. My initial guess was from an export specifically to get an early dump to get everyone on the ground chomping at the bit something to see. They'll get the full images when the SD cards splash down. When those are released, I'm expecting quite a few OMG images

I wouldn't mind some raw files but I honestly don't think they'll be too strikingly different than these (make sure you're looking at the full 20 MP images which should be several MB, not the 2 MP previews at ~200 KB).

I don't know what the Lightroom* skillz of the astronauts are, but I would not be surprised if they were shooting RAW+JPEG and only processed the JPGs in Lightroom. They probably had presets to export to smaller images that was created months ago and loaded onto their PCDs. I'd imagine 4 humans in a tincan have more things to do than to be developing RAW images by digging out the details in the shadows, push the exposure and pull back the highlights, and then apply all of those settings to each sequence of images. They'll let the folks on the ground do that.

* The exif data has Adobe Lightroom Classic (Windows) metadata in it.

In that case with the metadata I wonder if the astronauts already sent the raw files over the laser link and the images were just processed by the ground staff for posting on the site.

The raw files have a ton more dynamic range, however. You could pull out a lot more detail in shadows.

That’s really exciting!

> something uncanny about the bandwidth and quality of all the artifacts coming from this mission

Back in 2019, Robert Zubrin suggested using rovers "to do detailed photography of the [Moon] base area and its surroundings" to "ultimately form the basis of a virtual reality experience that will allow millions of members of the public to participate vicariously in the missions" [1].

[1] https://spacenews.com/op-ed-lunar-gateway-or-moon-direct/

I cannot wait until we get 4k video of people walking on the surface, kicking up dust.

The existing 16mm film from Apollo is roughly equivalent to 2K, and you can see dust kicked up pretty nicely!

Where can we see that in high quality? Generally if I look at YouTube it's compressed and poor quality.

Perhaps try the clips available at the "Video and 16-mm Galleries" from the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal:

https://apollojournals.org/alsj/alsj-video.html

On the other hand, maybe don't get your hopes up--I've only tried a few, but even the large MPG files don't seem to be "super high quality," but maybe they will meet your expectations.

They never shot 16mm film on the moon. They had weird tv cameras and took photos in 35mm.

Sure they did. Here’s some footage:

https://youtu.be/7o3Oi9JWsyM

Oh that's what the silent footage was! So sorry!

Yeah, I think we got so accustomed to that analog look that seeing them like this feels almost like viewing a World War I photo in full color and 4K.

I agree 100%. Seeing the picture of the backside of the moon with the earth in view really drove home that the moon really is just a large rock.

> backside of the moon

I think perhaps you mean the far side of the moon. The "backside" of the moon implies a large graben stretching almost from pole to pole, and I have seen no evidence of such a geological formation in any photos.

thanks, I audibly laughed

> the moon really is just a large rock

It really is surprising being able to see the Moon isn't spherical. (Are those abberations?) It makes sene, given the moon isn't in hydrostatic equilibrium.

Space monkeys, moon pirates, and a Starbucks in the moon mall.

What? The Apollo photos were with extremely high quality cameras on film. They're incredibly high resolution.