Slide Show: NASA’s Sunstruck Golden Age

Last month, at the two hundred and twenty-fifth annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, a team of scientists presented a newly assembled Hubble Space Telescope panorama of the Andromeda galaxy, our nearest major galactic neighbor. The image captures an area of almost indescribable proportions, some sixty-one thousand light-years from end to end, encompassing more than a hundred million stars. As Ray Villard, of the Space Telescope Science Institute, in Baltimore, wrote in an article that accompanied the image’s release, “It’s like photographing a beach and resolving individual grains of sand.”

We have grown accustomed to seeing space this way—in color-corrected composites, measurable in gigapixels, that blend visible and invisible wavelengths of light. Next week, however, Bloomsbury Auctions, in London, plans to sell a reminder of space exploration’s lower-res history—a collection of nearly seven hundred vintage NASA photographs, from the launch of the agency’s first satellite, in 1958, through its last manned lunar landing, in 1972.

The series includes familiar imagery from the missions of the nineteen-sixties and seventies—Apollo 11’s Buzz Aldrin descending a ladder onto the surface of the moon, Apollo 17’s Harrison Schmitt posing with an American flag spread stiff in windless low gravity. But there are also views of less triumphant moments. Some of the photographs are sunstruck, overexposed by sunlight that leaked into the camera; others show the astronauts’ difficulty in capturing a stable panorama. These images suggest a nascent reckoning with space’s size and strangeness, with its difficult working conditions, and with the uncertainties of exploring it. “I realized up there that our planet is not infinite,” Alan Shepard, the first American in space and the first to swing a six-iron on the moon, told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. “We look pretty vulnerable in the darkness.”