Amazing Public Domain Images

One of the few photographs to show the Earth in its entirety, The Blue Marble was shot on December 7, 1972 from Apollo 17 as it left orbit on the way to the moon. Officially, the photograph is credited to the entire crew, but it was mostly likely to have been taken by Jack Schmitt using a 70mm Hasselblad. It was the last time that humans have been high enough to shoot the entire Earth in one frame and is one of the most widely distributed images in the world.
Image courtesy of Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center

Photopreneur has a great write up on some public domain images that are simple outstanding. Many times when you see these images it means that someone has paid to enable you to see that image as photopreneur points out, whether it is the publisher, the ad company or the buyer.

Photopreneur points out that, "when it comes to photography, some of the best things really are free. That’s because copyright only lasts as long as the owner’s lifetime plus around seventy years so many images have fallen into the public domain, and also because one of the biggest sources of images is the US government. And because the government serves the citizens, the citizens own the images."


This photograph of a jellyfish was shot by Henry Kaiser of the National Science Foundation under the Ross Sea ice in October 2005. It's a pretty amazing example of a free image.
Photography: Henry Kaiser




The Fairy of Eagle Nebula
Credit: The Hubble Heritage Team, (STScI/AURA), ESA, NASA

Explanation: The dust sculptures of the Eagle Nebula are evaporating. As powerful starlight whittles away these cool cosmic mountains, the statuesque pillars that remain might be imagined as mythical beasts. Pictured above is one of several striking dust pillars of the Eagle Nebula that might be described as a gigantic alien fairy. This fairy, however, is ten light years tall and spews radiation much hotter than common fire. The greater Eagle Nebula, M16, is actually a giant evaporating shell of gas and dust inside of which is a growing cavity filled with a spectacular stellar nursery currently forming an open cluster of stars. The above image in scientifically re-assigned colors was released as part of the fifteenth anniversary celebration of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope.