posted 09-07-2023 10:45 AM            

I plan to auction most of them off on eBay. (If you know a better way of selling them, please tell me.) My problem is that they come in sets, organized by mission and by year. So there are sets for Vanguard, Pioneer, Gemini, and so on, up through Apollo. Some of the sets have 50 or more photos. The photos in these large sets are often redundant, with multiple photos of similar scenes, or a time-series of an event (like a launch).

My first question is: I don't know whether it's better to keep the sets together, to preserve the historic record; or to break them up, so that more people get a chance to own prints?

Also, eBay only lets me use 10 photos (if I recall correctly) per auction, so the only way to let people see what they're bidding on is to sell them in batches of 10. This would guarantee that the big sets would get broken up by action.

I'm making 600dpi scans of them all, so the historic record won't really be lost by breaking up the sets, though these scans are a bit disappointing — they aren't "really" 600dpi, because even if I scan them as TIFF, I get obvious compression artifacts (horizontal and vertical lines of noise). The only way to avoid the compression artifacts would be to buy a new flatbed scanner with no onboard compression, supposing such scanners exist, and scan them all in by hand, which I don't plan to do. (Without compression, the output files at 600dpi and 256 bits of gray would be 7 gigs each.)

posted 09-07-2023 02:55 PM               

There's also only so much quality and "information" you're going to get from a photo print, as opposed to a transparency (aka, photo negatives, positives, slides), so putting your ppi/dpi settings too high on one of those scans would basically be overkill (mostly talking about the potential uncompressed 7gb files from a photo you mentioned).

Luckily, if these are NASA issued 8x10s like you're saying, they're already going to be nice quality going into a scan. You just need to make it so they don't pixelate easily when people zoom into it on their computer. For a photo, I'd probably go about 300ppi and scan it as a TIFF file. If you can, make the original file a good TIFF size (between maybe 50-100mb each), and create a separate and smaller JPEG copy of each one (5mb-10mb) for easier loading to a website.

All this might be moot, though, if the scanner you're using is creating lines and artifacts at higher quality scan levels. Not sure how many of those images are already out there, being press kit photos, but if you're going to sell them and preserve the images beforehand, I'd definitely make it count by using a quality flatbed scanner. The printer/scanners people use at home can be "artifact city" when it comes to digitizing.

posted 10-08-2023 11:23 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Axman:
I'd approach one of the known space artifacts dealers directly.

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posted 10-09-2023 04:48 AM            

Try contacting Florian Noller direct through the contacts page on his website Been In Space as a starting point. I have no idea what his response will be, but as a piece of advice I shall stick with that as a starting point.