From panoramic images of lunar surfaces to ethereal shots of Earth from space and Neil Armstrong taking mankind’s first steps on the moon: an archive of more than 10,000 Nasa photographs taken by Apollo astronauts has landed on Flickr.

Every photograph taken on the moon by astronauts using Hasselblad cameras strapped to their chests is included in the collection in high resolution and unprocessed, as well as images of their journeys between Earth and lunar orbit.

NASA Apollo 17 Commander Ronald Evans with Gene Cernan as they head to the moon Photograph: Nasa/Project Apollo Archive

There are mundane shots of astronauts eating space food, testing lunar exploration vehicles and smiling into the camera. A shot of Buzz Aldrin exiting the Apollo lunar module – taken perhaps by his colleague Neil Armstrong – captures the difficulty in descending a ladder at zero gravity on to the moon’s surface.

Kipp Teague, who in 1999 created the Project Apollo archive, a large repository of images from missions during the zenith of US space exploration, oversaw the Flickr project. He said in a statement posted on Flickr that the uploaded galleries were a fresh presentation of Nasa’s Apollo imagery, “as it was originally provided in its raw, high-resolution and unprocessed form”.

An astronaut from the Apollo 15 mission with his space buggy. Photograph: Nasa/Project Apollo Archive

He told the Planetary Society, a community of space enthusiasts, that the Johnson Space Centre had begun rescanning the original camera film magazines in 2004. Teague, an IT director from Lynchburg, Virginia, said he and colleague Eric Jones, the author of the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, began obtaining uncompressed and high-resolution versions of these new scans on DVD.

“These images were processed for inclusion on our websites, including adjusting colour and brightness levels,” he said. The images were also reduced in size to about 1,000 dots per inch (dpi).

Although the images had been preserved and even digitised, improvements in quality of the screens now used meant the photos were left looking pixelated.

Teague said that over the years he had received numerous questions about the images, which prompted him to independently reprocess the archive in unedited, higher resolutions. The new versions are 1,800 dpi, even those shots that are blurry, black and white or close-up.

An earth orbit image from the Apollo 7 mission. Photograph: Nasa/Project Apollo Archive

On the moon’s surface during the Apollo 17 mission. Photograph: Nasa/Project Apollo Archive

The gallery includes photos from Apollo missions 7 to 17, including famous images from the first moon landing as well as pictures that came back with the crew of the aborted Apollo 13 mission, who were forced to use their lunar module to return to Earth after an oxygen tank ruptured.

On his Facebook page showcasing the project, Teague has been sharing some of the best processed scans, including rare images such as Apollo 11 training photos.