A real-time journey through the Apollo 17 mission | Hacker News Reader

A real-time journey through the Apollo 17 mission

apollo17.org

43 pointsCrespyl12 comments

Hi everyone, Thanks for the props. I'm the author of apollo17.org. I really appreciate the post.

This is really nicely done. Can you give a brief explanation of how you made it?

One thing I was looking for, and might have missed, but is there a planetary/trajectory view where we can see the craft go through space in time with the events?

I made it in these steps: - OCR data - Create timeline in premiere, time media to orig transcript (36 8-hour videos) - clean data by watching premiere by reading along OCRed data - Sync data with youtube playback via JS - create navigation scheme using paper.js - build data lazy loader in JS - collect photography, treat photography, time photography to timeline - ask my good friend, Chris to make it look nice for me

The whole site is client-side. The entire mission is loaded into the browser upon start. There's no server-side. Ironic given that my roots are as a server-side dev.

It took me years. I blogged about the making of here if you're interested: http://benfeist.com/category/apollo/

> It took me years.

Truly a labour of love, much appreciated.

Absolutely brilliant - I've only just had a chance to enjoy the first 15 minutes or so, and will be back for more when I have time, but thanks hugely for this immensely immersive experience. A real labour of love, but well worth it if the way I've just felt is anything to go by. I know that this will be taking up a lot of my time in the near future.

Beautiful use of data. Very well done.

It's beautiful. Thank you.

I love these sites. Here's a similar one that covers the Apollo 11 moon landing:

http://www.firstmenonthemoon.com/

Great to hear the banter of Cernan/Evans/Schmitt during the launch. A Saturn V must be a hell of a ride.

I hope we get back to this sort of thing in the next 10 years.

Hi again everyone. Today's the actual anniversary of the launch. As of 9:55pm EST, Dec 6, and until Dec 19th (when the mission ends), http://apollo17.org/?t=rt will drop you into the mission exactly 43 years ago to the second. The crew might be working, eating, walking on the moon, or even sleeping. At any time you can jump out of "real time" mode and explore the whole experience, or click to sync back up with today's date an time to continue along.

Hope you enjoy.

I thought this would be something like Spacelog[1], which is impressive in its own right.

I'm simply blown away by the integration of audio / activity graphs / images.

[1]: http://spacelog.org/

I just poked around the launch, the landing, the initial EVA, and the splash down on return. This is simply a beautiful historical reference.

I've recently rekindled my interest of space flight by watching the series When We Left Earth (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1233514/). Loving checking out some of this site too!

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