Comments on: NASA Images / Internet Archive

NASA Images / Internet Archive

stbalbach — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:58:50 -0800

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.

By: yhbc

yhbc — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 19:18:03 -0800

Great! Oh, there are no pictures up yet. Not great!

By: rajbot

rajbot — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 19:25:56 -0800

Oh, there are no pictures up yet. This search shows that there are already at least 100,000 images up.

By: grobstein

grobstein — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 19:29:02 -0800

Woot! Political cover for Internet Archive!

By: yhbc

yhbc — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 19:33:22 -0800

How did you do that, rajbot? I see nothing at the nasaimages site except the title graphics.

By: b1tr0t

b1tr0t — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 19:41:05 -0800

rajbot is secretly Brewster Khale

By: rajbot

rajbot — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 19:43:13 -0800

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.

By: East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 19:51:03 -0800

Woot! Political cover for Internet Archive! NASA also provides political cover for BitTorrent. It's because they are a bunch of nerds. Thanks, nerds!

By: vertigo25

vertigo25 — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:06:34 -0800

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.

By: nasreddin

nasreddin — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:06:51 -0800

This post is disappointing. It looks like my nasal image fetish must forever go unsatisfied.

By: yhbc

yhbc — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:17:08 -0800

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.

By: Saxon Kane

Saxon Kane — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:21:33 -0800

Brewster's Millions! (of photos)

By: vertigo25

vertigo25 — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:25:05 -0800

One flaw I've found... URLs are about a billion billion miles long. Thank the internet gods for TinyURL.

By: ryanrs

ryanrs — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:29:34 -0800

Get better browser, stupid.

By: hortense

hortense — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 21:30:58 -0800

Auroras underfoot

By: longsleeves

longsleeves — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 21:44:22 -0800

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?

By: agress

agress — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:39:39 -0800

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.

By: kokogiak

kokogiak — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:48:27 -0800

Not a fan of the zoomy ajaxy browser. Also, downloaded images are zipped. Sigh. Still, very awesome having everything in one spot. Thanks!

By: DU

DU — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 04:10:14 -0800

Wait, why does the internet archive need political cover?

By: a bad enough dude

a bad enough dude — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:21:19 -0800

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 :(

By: grobstein

grobstein — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:50:24 -0800

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.