Presenting: Classic NASA Photography, Formatted To Use As Palm Pre Wallpaper

Posted on February 2, 2010

So I’ve got this phone, the Palm Pre, which is a pretty great device (and getting better every day).

I wanted to customize it a bit, so I started looking around for downloadable wallpapers. Turns out there aren’t many. So I decided to pitch in and help change that a little bit.

For source material, I turned to GRIN — NASA’s database of “Great Images in NASA,” which contains tons of stunning high-resolution photos from the history of American manned space flight, some of which are among the iconic images of the 20th century. These pictures are great in their own right, and because they were produced by the Federal government, the copyright on them has already been turned over to the public.

So I went through the database, found 58 of the most striking images, and reformatted them (via scaling and strategic cropping) to fit the 320×480 display of the Pre. Result: perfect wallpapers that look stunning on the Pre’s bright screen.

Once you’ve put in the work to assemble something like that, you may as well share it with the community. So here’s the set, hosted on Flickr. And here’s a slideshow of the complete set:

Feel free to download the ones you like and use them on your own Pre — or any other device with a 320×480 display!