The NASA Photo Book

A photographic book of NASA, end to end: more than 340 pictures, restored from the archives and printed large, from the first blurred frames of the Moon to the Artemis II crew photographing its far side. The story starts before NASA does. The oldest photograph in the book is the first ever made of the Moon, a pale disc caught on a silver plate from a New York rooftop in 1840. Since 1958, NASA has photographed nearly everything it has done, and its archive now runs to millions of frames. This book is a journey through that record, arranged by what the agency was looking at and how it was looking, rather than strictly by the calendar. Mercury and Gemini, Apollo, Skylab and the Shuttle. Viking and Voyager, Hubble and Cassini, the rovers on Mars, the International Space Station and the James Webb Space Telescope. Earthrise and the Blue Marble. Bootprints in lunar dust. Jupiter's storms. Saturn's rings. Galaxies whose light is older than Earth. The pictures the world knows are all here, and around them sit frames from deep in the archive that have barely been looked at since the day they came down, engineering records that happened to catch the light, quiet moments nobody thought to publish. Laid side by side, these are not separate marvels but one continuous story, of an agency learning to see, one kind of eye at a time, and always, in the end, looking back at home. Every photograph is restored from the best surviving source, the original film scans where they still exist and the raw mission image data where they do not. The damage of the decades comes off, the dust and scratches and fading, and the colour comes back. Nothing is added that was never there, and nothing is pushed further than the frame really holds. The grain stays. Each image is supported by a short caption: what the photograph shows, who made it and where, and the detail worth stopping on. The forty dollar drugstore camera John Glenn carried into orbit. Twelve Hasselblads left standing in the lunar dust. An iPhone held against a window on the way around the Moon. Every era opens with the world of its years, who we all were down here while the cameras were up there. The book is large on purpose. Most of these photographs are known from screens and social feeds. Printed at this size they behave differently. You notice the grain, the dust on a lens, the thumbprint of the person who framed it, and you stay with a crater floor or the edge of a storm longer than you meant to. Joel Meter and Simon Phillipson have spent years inside the NASA archives. Their two earlier books with teNeues have each appeared in several editions, the bestselling Apollo VII-XVII, and VOYAGER: Photographs from Humanity's Greatest Journey. This third one is where that work led, and it reaches Artemis II, the first crewed flight in fifty-three years to photograph the Moon's far side.