Nearly 50 years have passed since the Apollo programme first delivered astronauts to the surface of the Moon.

In that time, millions of words have been written about that mission, and the pictures the astronauts and cosmonauts captured on the race to our nearest neighbour have become iconic images.

But there’s been one problem for space enthusiasts poring over the images captured in orbit and on the lifeless lunar surface – they only reveal its beauty in two dimensions. As spectacular as they are, they can only do so much to make you feel like you’re there.

But amid the thousands of photos taken on Nasa's space missions, some of the images created were intended to make the viewer feel they were right there - stereo photographs that have only now come to light, thanks to a new book masterminded by Queen's Brian May.

“The Mission Moon book came about because we’re all kind of nuts about the Moon shot, and it all seems like yesterday to us old people. It’s 50 years ago – incredible,” he says.

“No one had ever done a 3D book on the whole Apollo history and we thought ‘Can we do it, is there enough material?’. So my good friend Claudia Manzoni, who spends her whole life trawling through Nasa archives, gradually sifted through and found images which looked promising.”

The astronauts didn’t take stereo cameras up with them, but they were trained in a rudimentary stereo photography method which meant their normal photographs could easily be turned into 3D images.“Very often they were too busy to remember it and practice it,” May says. “But they were taught to do the ‘cha-cha’ thing – take a picture here and a picture there and eventually it became a 3D picture. Occasionally you’re lucky enough to find one of those.

“I’m not the first person to make 3D pictures in this way but I think we are the most persistent… we’ve got something like 200 stereo pictures in the book, and they all work.”

May can add inventor to his long list of achievements, as well. At the back of each copy of the book is his patented Owl stereoscopic viewer, a pair of plastic lenses that help create the 3D effect. The Owl is the result of May collecting viewers since the early days of Queen, and combining the best bits of various designs.

“For me, it’s a nice coming together,” says May. “It is stereoscopic work, and it’s also astrophysics and it’s astronautics, and to bring them together is great. It wasn’t on my own, we have a great team. David Eicher wrote the text, he’s a wonderful writer and editor-in-chief of Astronomy magazine, and as a team we put this together.“

The guy who wrote our afterword – Jim Lovell [Apollo 13 crew member] – said this is the closest you can to feeling like you’re there.”Mission Moon 3D by David J Eicher and Brian May is published by the London Stereoscopic Company on 23 October. You can also visit the book's site, www.missionmoon3-d.com