(CNN) -- Sitting incongruously among the hangars and laboratories of NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley is the squat facade of an old McDonald's. You won't get a burger there, though -- its cash registers and soft-serve machines have given way to old tape drives and modern computers run by a rogue team of hacker engineers who've rechristened the place McMoon's. These self-described techno-archaeologists have been on a mission to recover and digitize forgotten photos taken in the '60s by a quintet of scuttled lunar satellites. The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) has since 2007 brought some 2,000 pictures back from 1,500 analog data tapes. They contain the first high-resolution photographs ever taken from behind the lunar horizon, including the first photo of an earthrise (first slide above). Thanks to the technical savvy and DIY engineering of the team at LOIRP, it's being seen at a higher resolution than was ever previously possible.
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NASA-funded project has recovered 2,000 analog moon pictures
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The images were taken by the five Lunar Orbiter images between 1966 and 1967
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Project uses old and modern technology to produce high-res copies of the originals.
After kluging through countless engineering problems (try finding a chemical substitute for whale oil to lubricate tape heads), the @placeholder team was able to single out and reproduce the famous earthrise image.