In pictures: Vintage Nasa photographs for sale

  • Published

A collection of vintage photographs by Nasa's pioneering astronauts goes under the hammer at Bloomsbury Auctions in London on 26 February 2015.

It includes images not published before, some taken on the surface of the Moon during the early days of space exploration.

Here is a selection of the pictures on sale.

Image source, © Bloomsbury Auctions

Astronaut William Anders took this picture of the Earth from Apollo 8 in December 1968, using a modified Hasselblad camera. It is expected to fetch between £1,000 and 1,500 at auction.

Image source, © Bloomsbury Auctions

A portrait of Buzz Aldrin from the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon shows the photographer, Neil Armstrong, and the Lunar Module reflected in his gold-plated visor.

Image source, Bloomsbury Auctions

This is the first photograph taken from space, on 24 October 1946 from a camera on a V2 rocket. Clyde Holliday, an engineer on the project, wrote at the time in National Geographic that it showed for the first time how the Earth would look to visitors from another planet.

Image source, © Bloomsbury Auctions

For almost 20 years after Apollo 11, the only pictures known of Neil Armstrong on the Moon were a few grainy images from the TV camera and the 16mm film footage. That was until this picture was discovered in their archives in Houston.

Image source, Bloomsbury Auctions

This a picture from the personal photograph album of Ed White, which record his spacewalk, performed on Gemini 4 in 1965, the first by an American.

Image source, © Bloomsbury Auctions

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin took the first self-portrait in space during the Gemini 12 mission in November 1966.

Image source, © Bloomsbury Auctions

Mr Aldrin also took this picture of a boot print on the lunar surface, from Apollo 11, in July 1969.

All the photographs in the sale are vintage, printed shortly after they were taken, on high-quality Kodak paper, with estimates ranging from £300 to £10,000.

From the Earth to the Moon will be held at Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions' saleroom in London's Mayfair on 26 February 2015.