Three researchers huddle around a wheezing 45-year-old Ampex FR-900A tape machine, a one-of-a-kind reel to reel 2-inch model designed to record data for the National Security Agency. It now sits where people used to wolf down Big Macs.

Behind the counter, where the fry-tubs and refrigerators used to be, one-thousand five hundred 14-inch diameter tape reels are clustered in five piles. Each reel has a two letter identifier followed by three numbers. 'GT' is for Goldstone, 'MT' for Madrid and so forth; the numbers start with 1 through 5. They look old and ready for the scrap heap. And that’s where they were headed until NASA archivist Nancy Evans plucked them for safe-keeping more than 30 years ago.

“These tapes hold the best images of the moon ever taken, even to today,” says Dennis Wingo, a lanky 55-year-old engineering physicist who heads the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project. As he taps the keyboard on a high-end Macintosh with dual wide screen displays, he darts a glance at a laptop displaying weather radar images where a tornado has touched down near his home in Alabama.

Wingo and engineer Ken Zin, a tall 64-year-old former National Security Agency engineer, along with San Jose State senior Austin Epps, believe they have a hefty responsibility: each of these tape reels hold one high-resolution image and one slightly lower resolution image that have never been seen by the public. They’re trying to let the world see what the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft sent back to earth in the heady early days of the space program. In 1966, NASA wanted to know where to send the first lunar astronauts.

A few months ago the Image Recovery Project released the first recovered image, and now they have about 30 images processed and digitized.

You can see their progress at www.moonviews.com.

KTVU looked at several images, and the detail and clarity are astonishing. It’s the difference between grainy 35mm film with several generations of degradation, and the 70mm film original.

Wingo brought up NASA’s publicly released photo from August 23, 1966, called “Earthrise.” Time Magazine called it the “Photo of the Century” and it is certainly amazing even today. But on the next screen Wingo showed the digitized version from the original tracking station tapes. Zooming in on the first version, Earth looks a bit fuzzy, though you can make out cloud patterns. On the recovered version, you can see fog along the Chilean coast, ice floes near the Antarctic. It is truly astonishing.

“Using these and some other 1966 images, we may be able to help push NASA’s climate data back in time a full decade, which will help with climate change studies,” says Wingo.

On shots of the lunar surface, the first versions show a blurry shadow here, some grayish along the horizon. The digitized recovered image is crisp with the deep black of space hovering over a multi-shaded gray surface, almost as if you were looking out the window of some lunar highrise. You can see rocks the size of an office chair. Sharp shadows and almost a 3D effect.

These images were photographed from just 47 kilometers altitude, with a 24-inch diameter reflector telescope. Images were exposed on 70mm film, developed in lunar orbit, and scanned while transmitting the analog images back to Earth. Each of the five Lunar Orbiters were deliberately crashed into the lunar regolith.

Wingo was a school kid when these pictures were taken, and the professional in him is impressed. “This is almost a hundred times better resolution than the best Hubble (Space Telescope) could do from Earth orbit.”

Zin is proud of cobbling together the old tape machine, “it wouldn’t be possible to recover anything from these tapes without it.”

Epps, whose father was only ten when the spacecraft snapped the photos, says he’s astounded at how good the technology was back then. “Nobody else has seen the Moon up close as this except for the people that’ve actually been there.”

The project hopes to have all three thousand pictures online within a year.