They may be among the most famous images ever produced, but for the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Nasa has turned to the latest in Hollywood film technology to clean up its images of what is arguably mankind's most impressive feat.
Nasa worked with Lowry Digital, an LA production house that has restored over 400 Hollywood films, to restore roughly two-and-a-half hours of material that astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin captured during their 1969 expedition.
Last night, Nasa released the first images from the £140,000 project, and they are, as you'd expect, incredible.They show startlingly sharp images without the fuzziness of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin skipping across the Moon and planting the US flag.
The images were originally processed by television scan converters located at NASA’s tracking sites. The materials were gathered from a wide variety of sources. Part of Lowry Digital’s challenge was to untangle the knot of formats, frame rates and resolutions to produce a single piece of film. And if this is their first attempt, one can only wonder how good the rest of the 2.5 hours of footage will look.