About archive

all useful information about the archive

This page will explain to you how to navigate the archive, download photos, the software used to create it, and other general information.

How to navigate through the archive?

When you arrive on the “Archive” page, you’ll see two folders: one containing celestial objects in our solar system, and the other containing those outside our solar system, sorted by constellation. A constellation is a conventionally defined region of the sky that includes a particular group of stars. So, it allows you to locate a celestial object that is inside that region as viewed from Earth. Below is the location of the center of our Milky Way galaxy as viewed from Earth: it is located in the constellation of Sagittarius, at the border with the constellation of Scorpius.

Location of the Milky Way in the constellation of Sagittarius

The most interesting folders in the archive

Search in the archive

If you wish to search through the photos, you can use the two magnifying glasses at the top right of the “archive” page. The magnifying glass at the top allows you to search the entire site. The lower magnifying glass allows you to search in the folder you are currently in.

Sorting and processing of photos

The purpose of this site is to gather as many photos as possible of our universe in one place while highlighting the beauty of the images. It is not just about archiving for the sake of archiving. For this reason, the archive you will find here may not be complete for all missions and may not necessarily offer the original images. Here are two telling examples:

_The set of photographs from the Apollo missions contains a large number of photos that are visually uninteresting: there are many that are entirely black or extremely blurry. These photos have therefore been removed from the archive where possible.

_The complete set of photographs from the “EarthKam” mission from 2001 to 2017 in their original JPG format represents more than 190GB. By applying a slight 5% compression while maintaining the original resolution, we gain 140GB… So, some complete missions undergo compression and/or resolution reduction.The most spectacular photos are kept at their original size, no matter how much space they take up (within reason). As an example, the image below, in its original version (if you click on this link or open it in a new tab, it will take a very long time to load), weighs 454MB. It depicts the surface of Mercury:

TIFF format images (without compression, hence no loss of quality) have been excluded from the archive in favor of their equivalent in JPG format. For example, the photo above weighs 760MB in TIFF format…

How to download the entire archive?

To retrieve the entire archive in one go without having to download files one by one, you can use a website scraper such as HTTrack.

Crédits

It is difficult to display the license and credits corresponding to each hosted photo individually, but I make an effort to display this information wherever possible. For each mission folder available in the archive, you can see the corresponding credits, links, and licenses.

The most comprehensive list possible of credits for the photos hosted on the site is available on a dedicated page.

Credit for the photos used on this page :

• Sky Map “Location of the Milky Way” — IAU and Sky & Telescope
magazine (Roger Sinnott & Rick Fienberg) | License : Creative Commons BY 3.0 | Modifications made: Removal of the legend and location of the
Milky Way surrounded in red.
• Surface of Mercury “Mercury MESSENGER MDIS Basemap Enhanced Color Global Mosaic 665m (64ppd)” — NASA | License : Public domain.

Credit for other photos on the site :

Detailed credits for all photographs from each mission are available on the “Credits” page.

Software used to download, sort and process photographs

The following software tools are all free.

Downloading photos

• DownThemAll : A browser extension (Firefox, Chrome, and Edge) that allows for bulk downloading of URLs.

• jDownloader : A software for Windows, Linux, and OSX that allows for bulk downloading of URLs. (Note: jDownloader contains adware. To obtain the adware-free version, be sure to use the link I provide.)

• HTTrack : Website scraper (Windows, Linux, and OSX).

• URLGen : Software that allows for the generation of a list of URLs according to a defined pattern (Windows).

Processing and sorting photos

• CaesiumCLT : Command-line tool used to compress certain photos. (Linux, OSX, Windows)

• VisiPics : Software that detects identical photos (Windows).

• ImageMagick : Command-line bulk processing (compression, resizing, rotation, renaming, EXIF, …). Really powerful tool. (Linux, Windows, OSX)

• Upscayl : Software that quadruples the resolution of an image while significantly increasing its sharpness. Uses artificial intelligence models. Very impressive results. (Linux, Windows, OSX)

• Photofiltre : I use Photofiltre as a general-purpose image editor. (Windows)

• Cleanup.pictures : Used to remove certain elements on the photos of the home page: for example the dust and the crosses present on the photos of Apollo. The site is limited in its free use. I use the Pro version. (Online tool)