Collections Processing Unit
Imaging Special Projects
The National Air and Space Museum enjoys the benefits of many volunteers who contribute hours and hours of their time and share an extraordinary amount of their expertise they bring with them. Two of those volunteers—Jon Barrett and Jim Walker—have formed the backbone of the Collections Processing Unit’s (CPU) development of documentation photography and object digitization for over a decade.
Working in close conjunction with CPU and the National Air and Space Museum staff at all three of the Museum facilities, they have experimented with a number of digital imaging techniques to help bring the collection and the museum to the world in virtual form. Through their digitization of collections objects in storage and behind the scenes, members of the public gain access to viewpoints and details that are otherwise unavailable. And through virtual tours visitors can explore spaces that cannot be seen or accessed.
Specialized techniques have included composited photography of flat and three-dimensional objects to create ultra-high-resolution images of key objects, Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) to capture surface details and textures in a dynamic viewing environment, photogrammetry to produce 3D virtual models of selected objects, UV-induced visible light fluorescence imaging, and panoramic photography to produce cylindrical and spherical dynamically viewable virtual tours.
The Apollo 11 Command Module Columbia displayed in the new "Destination Moon" exhibition, opening Oct. 14, 2022.
Credit: Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum
This blog provides some insight into a virtual tour of the NASM main building downtown. This virtual tour provides a further value as a snapshot in time, captured on camera over several years around 2015 to 2018—a snapshot in time that is now part of our own history, as the complete renovation of the museum building will replace all of the galleries with a new and exciting era of exploration for our visitors.
One fascinating item in the Museum's collection is General James H. Doolittle’s tablecloth. By capturing nearly 100 closeup digital images and stitching them all together, the resulting image shows the entire 6 foot by 7 foot tablecloth, with the ability to zoom all the way in to see the individual stitches on any one of over 800 signatures of famous and historical aviation figures from the early era of flight.
Additional Projects
The National Air and Space Museum holds the vast majority of NASA’s historical spacesuits, from developmental models to Apollo suits that protected astronauts working on the surface of the moon. In December 2011, the CPU moved the entire collection from Suitland, Maryland, to new storage facilities in Chantilly, Virginia.
Also in the collection, a series of experimental research materials and models developed by Samuel Pierpont Langley, the third Secretary of the Smithsonian and a scientific pioneer in the earliest days of powered flight. Rehousing that collection in preparation for transport to new storage brought a number of challenges to the fore.
