Europa over Jupiter’s
Great Red Spot. Multi-frame mosaic
Voyager 1, March 3, 1979
[Kinetikon Pictures]

Printing Techniques

Edition and Prices

Recent Additions Gallery

Top quality limited-edition photographic prints of almost all of the images from “Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes” are available for acquisition by private collectors, museums and public institutions. All are printed using cutting-edge digital-to-photo  processes, and all benefit from the seamlessness and extraordinarily high attention to detail, contrast and print quality that digital image processing of the original source files can obtain. The pictures are printed on Kodak photographic paper using a Durst Lambda, then processed. Almost all of the pictures on offer started as digital image files (except the Lunar Orbiter shots, which were drum-scanned at extremely high resolution from hard copy prints). Many of these pictures were discovered in deep archives of tens or even hundreds of thousands of images sent to Earth by four decades of space probe missions; they have never been seen by the public before. Quite a few of these pictures were mosaicked together from multiple previously “undiscovered” individual frames selected from raw data sets – and then rendered into color. Others were already processed and rendered into color composite images by NASA or its divisions before extensive additional work was put in at Kinetikon Pictures to remove remaining data errors, small imperfections, and color inaccuracies. In a number of cases, planetary scientists not directly connected to NASA or non-specialist enthusiasts contributed work. [For more on the work behind the pictures, go to About the Photographs]

Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes is a book and an exhibition, but it is also an ongoing project expected to last decades. This project is about curatorship (in which a continuing selection is made of the most aesthetically pleasing images from robotic space missions) and processing (in which those pictures are carefully upgraded using the best image-processing software, with the goal being to produce photographic prints of an unprecedented clarity, sharpness and realism). As a final stage limited edition print runs are produced. All pictures from the ongoing Beyond project that did not make it into the first and second printings of the book can be seen here.

[For an article on the recent acquisition of three prints by the Worcester Art Museum, click here.]