For most people, a rainy Tuesday night means tea, television and wondering whether the recycling will actually be collected. For Culcheth photographer Andy Saunders, it meant spending another few hours restoring photographs from the Apollo missions.
That extraordinary obsession has paid off spectacularly. Andy's painstaking work on astronaut-taken images has earned worldwide recognition, support from NASA and now a bestselling book, Apollo Remastered.
The book brings together more than 400 restored Apollo photographs, revealing details that were largely hidden in the original, low-quality images. Each picture is accompanied by captions, research and quotes from the astronauts at the moment the photographs were taken, giving readers both the technical story and the human one.
Andy said he initially had no idea what he would do with all the restored images, other than sharing them with museums, news outlets and people online. The enthusiastic response eventually convinced him that a book was the obvious next step. Quite a sensible conclusion, really, although it did require around 10,000 hours of image processing before the research and writing were even counted.
“I figured it could work really well to tell the story of each Apollo mission and the whole programme via the wonderful imagery,” Andy said.
The result quickly became a Sunday Times Bestseller and the biggest-selling non-fiction book on Amazon. It is a specialist and fairly expensive volume, but that seems to have mattered less than expected. Readers have been passing it around, showing it to friends and discovering that this is very much a book that needs to be held, rather than merely admired on a screen.
Andy admitted that the success was astonishing, especially when compared with those late-night editing sessions in his Culcheth home office.
“If you would have told me this would happen when I was editing away on these old photos at 2am on some rainy Tuesday in my home office a couple of years ago, I would have said you were nuts,” he said.
Support from the people who were there
One of the most meaningful parts of the project has been NASA's support, particularly as the book celebrates the Apollo programme while helping build excitement for the return to the Moon through Artemis.
Andy also developed a connection with Jim McDivitt, commander of Apollo Nine, who appears on the cover and sadly died recently aged 93. Andy had been in contact with him during the research, and managed to send an advance copy to McDivitt's family only a few weeks before his death.
McDivitt reportedly loved the book, enjoyed the memories it brought back and even approved of how handsome he looked on the cover. That personal response meant more to Andy than any sales figure, which is probably the right priority when dealing with living history.
Several Apollo astronauts helped with the research, image selection and accuracy checks. Rusty Schweickart, who took the cover photograph, was particularly generous with his time and was amazed by the restoration.
Charlie Duke, who walked on the Moon during Apollo 16, offered perhaps the most powerful endorsement, saying Andy's remastered images were so clear and real that they were “the next best thing to being there”. That is a formidable review from someone who actually was there.
From Culcheth to the Moon and back
Apollo Remastered was available from Amazon and bookshops, while an exhibition of images from the book was held at Glasgow Science Centre until April 2023, with a concurrent exhibition in Dubai in February 2023.
The main exhibition was scheduled to visit the Williamson Art Gallery in Wirral from April to September 2023, with a smaller selection displayed at Jodrell Bank from December 3 to April 2023. Book signings were also planned.
It is a remarkable achievement for a photographer based in Culcheth: taking images captured during humanity's greatest adventure and making them feel startlingly immediate again. The Moon may be a quarter of a million miles away, but Andy Saunders has brought its detail considerably closer to home.
The original report was produced through an exclusive subscriber partnership with USA Today and noted that it did not necessarily reflect the view of The Herald.