The US space agency NASA has just release more than 8,400 images taken by its astronauts who journeyed from the Earth to the Moon between 1969 and 1972, revealing in stunning high definition photos that very few people have previously seen.

Armed with a number of Hasselblad cameras, the astronauts were encouraged to take photographs while working on their scientific experiments en route to the Earth’s biggest satellite. The images were preserved and digitised, but started to look increasingly dated and fuzzy as photographic technology for amateur photographers dramatically improved over the years.

But now, every photo taken by American astronauts on the moon – along with the travelogue images of the trips there and back – have been released in a much higher resolution than ever seen before to one huge gallery on the photo-sharing website Flickr.

Cleaning up the 8,400 images was a painstaking process, according to Kipp Teague, who heads the Project Apollo Archive.

"Around 2004, Johnson Space Centre began re-scanning the original Apollo Hasselblad camera film magazines, and Eric Jones and I began obtaining TIFF (uncompressed, high-resolution) versions of these new scans on DVD," Teague said in an interview with The Planetary Society.

"These images were processed for inclusion on our websites, including adjusting color and brightness levels, and reducing the images in size to about 1000 dpi (dots per inch) for the high-resolution versions." 

Teague adds that there are many more images to come, as the huge collection does not include film magazines from Apollos 7, 8, 9, 10, or 13, which will be added in the coming weeks and months.

You can take a look at some of the images in the gallery below: