I recently posted the existence of this blog to another forum of serious researchers at www.unmannedspaceflight.com and since have had a few terse comments posted here (which I have now edited as of July 2007). My intention in posting there was to have these people take a look and see if maybe I was getting anything wrong or taking too broad a liberty with extending some images to fill the proportions of a wallpaper image. What I have had instead is a few people angry with me that I didn't credit certian people enough for some of the fine work they have done. The one example that I would really agree with was the Venus Projection image i colorized. Don P. Mitchell really did some extraordinary work on re-translating the old Venera data into those images used and I removed his credit from the color version which was water-marked. I left it in the original B&W image on the post, and linked to him in the text… but the wallpaper was void of any credit back to him and I have repaired that. Some other comments have been made about other usage and I guess I am feeling like it starts to get silly. The flash thing at the top picks from about 30 random images and apparently one of them was an image that someone had worked on. Now, I can remember staring at these places when I was in Junior High School and the image I used up top was nearly identical to this image I have been told was produced by a freelancer more recently. You see, NASA image are famously copyright free as the missions are paid through government funds… or taxes. So the trick here is to know when it is NASA free and not NASA free. When I made many of these wallpaper images I was not sharing them on a blog and didn't know I would one day. So I wasn't taking notation on where I found the original and I wasn't looking to see if anyone was claiming credit.
So, if you are one of these people whose materials I may have unintetionally lifted… please keep in mind this is non-profit, I do this in the interest of public interest of space exploration and that I admire the work you do very much. Just drop me a line and I will brand most anything with your credit and update the files. As a matter of fact, many of these freelancers maintain their own websites containing awesome galleries of images rarely seen by mainstream media so I am thinking adding some of these sites to a nice links page could be a great resource as well. One great example I recently found is this one for Mars Rover images: MER Imagery run by James Canvin.
From now on I will try to take note of where I am getting these things and run a credit and provide a link. The more the merrier.