NASA Images / Internet Archive

July 24, 2008 6:58 PM

Brewster Khale over at Internet Archive just announced they are working with NASA to make available the most comprehensive compilation ever of NASA's vast collection of photographs, historic film and video at nasaimages.org. It combines for the first time 21 major NASA imagery collections into a single, searchable online resource.
posted by stbalbach (20 comments total)

Great!

Oh, there are no pictures up yet.

Not great!
posted by yhbc at 7:18 PM on July 24, 2008

Oh, there are no pictures up yet.

This search shows that there are already at least 100,000 images up.
posted by rajbot at 7:25 PM on July 24, 2008

Woot! Political cover for Internet Archive!
posted by grobstein at 7:29 PM on July 24, 2008

How did you do that, rajbot? I see nothing at the nasaimages site except the title graphics.
posted by yhbc at 7:33 PM on July 24, 2008

rajbot is secretly Brewster Khale
posted by b1tr0t at 7:41 PM on July 24, 2008

heh. I tried firefox and safari, with javascript both on and off, and see a bunch of thumbnails with both browsers. With javascript turned on, I can click on an image and zoom in and out, and pan around with a google-maps-style ajaxy interface.
posted by rajbot at 7:43 PM on July 24, 2008

Woot! Political cover for Internet Archive!

NASA also provides political cover for BitTorrent. It's because they are a bunch of nerds. Thanks, nerds!
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 7:51 PM on July 24, 2008 [3 favorites]

So.Damn.Cool.

For years, I have been irritated by how the NASA/JPL archives are spread over so many sites and domains, and often under very cumbersome UIs.

Oh... and I don't know if it works with a normal scroll wheel, but if you're using a MacBook, you can hover over an image, use a two-finger scroll on the touchpad, and it will zoom the image in and out.

Actually... the whole site has a super nice interface. Nothing "amazing! wow! I've never seen anything like it before!" but nice... it has the right "feel" for the content, IMO.
posted by vertigo25 at 8:06 PM on July 24, 2008

This post is disappointing. It looks like my nasal image fetish must forever go unsatisfied.
posted by nasreddin at 8:06 PM on July 24, 2008

So, I'm guessing it doesn't work for IE, then?

Great. No, don't service 3/4 of your visitors, because they're all too stupid to use a better browser. Good plan.
posted by yhbc at 8:17 PM on July 24, 2008

Brewster's Millions!

(of photos)
posted by Saxon Kane at 8:21 PM on July 24, 2008

One flaw I've found...

URLs are about a billion billion miles long.

Thank the internet gods for TinyURL.
posted by vertigo25 at 8:25 PM on July 24, 2008

Get better browser, stupid.
posted by ryanrs at 8:29 PM on July 24, 2008

Auroras underfoot
posted by hortense at 9:30 PM on July 24, 2008

Re: Auroras underfoot - Awsome - as in awe inspiring. But it looks like the shuttle cargo bay is open at the same time the engines are firing. can they do that?
posted by longsleeves at 9:44 PM on July 24, 2008

Hmm, tis true, looks like IE is left out in the cold when it comes to this site.

On firefox (or anything other than IE I guess,) I'm not too fond of the interface (I hate the scrollwheel zoom!) I think I would much rather have a unified "portal" of sorts to the images of the various NASA missions.

I'm an unabashed fan of the "raw" images that NASA puts out, and this site seems like a whole lot of PR images instead. I mean, I like the PR pictures, they sure are pretty, but I'll take a raw image over any processed and composited image any day.
posted by agress at 10:39 PM on July 24, 2008

Not a fan of the zoomy ajaxy browser. Also, downloaded images are zipped. Sigh. Still, very awesome having everything in one spot. Thanks!
posted by kokogiak at 10:48 PM on July 24, 2008

Wait, why does the internet archive need political cover?
posted by DU at 4:10 AM on July 25, 2008

Disappointing... all the photos I've found have been really low-res. Am I missing something, or is this whole collection 72dpi and too small to set as my desktop? It would be great to have a collection of these images in various sizes for different purposes. Oh well :(
posted by a bad enough dude at 8:21 AM on July 25, 2008

Wait, why does the internet archive need political cover?

I was kind of kidding, but my idea was that 1) it's a socially very important service but 2) it's usefulness depends on unrestricted copying and republishing of everything. Copying sometimes seems like a threatened activity.
posted by grobstein at 8:50 AM on July 25, 2008