Skip to main content

Apollo 11 in Real Time: A New Web Site Lets You Take a Real-Time Journey Through First Landing on the Moon

It only took four days. Four, long, nail-biting days where anything could go wrong, with so many fraught steps, between the liftoff of Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong leaving the first footprint on the moon. And now fifty years stretches between us and those days, very brief days indeed, where the population of the earth came together over one stunning act of science and ingenuity. Yes, it was an American flag planted on the moon, but it was one giant leap for mankind.

This July we might want to revisit those warm feelings about humanity in what feels like a diminished world, and look in wonder at the stars again. The Apollo In Real Time website is here to do just that.

Now you can go to this website, sit back and watch as the entire Apollo 11 mission unfolds in real time.

It’s a beautifully designed website, looking like a control panel from NASA itself. There are three timelines up top to show exactly where we are over the entire course of the nine days, from launch to re-entry. On the left there is a summary of Mission Status, including velocity and distance from the earth. Below is a real time transcript between mission control and the craft. And a strip down the middle offers over 40 different channels of audio from all the main and not-so-main players, a total of 11,000 hours, most of which has never been heard before. Where available there’s film and video footage, along with photographs, a lot of it taken by the astronauts themselves, and all in the best possible quality. So if you think you’ve seen this footage over and over, think again.

(Side note: I find just listening to the sounds of mission control is very relaxing. I'm thinking a lot of you will agree.)

The site is the creation of Ben Feist, a software engineer and historian at NASA, along with his team of collaborators, who undertook something similar a few years ago for Apollo 17.

via Kottke.org

Related Content:

NASA Digitizes 20,000 Hours of Audio from the Historic Apollo 11 Mission: Stream Them Free Online

Watch the Original TV Coverage of the Historic Apollo 11 Moon Landing: Recorded on July 20, 1969

The Source Code for the Apollo 11 Moon Landing Mission Is Now Free on Github

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW's Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Apollo 11 in Real Time: A New Web Site Lets You Take a Real-Time Journey Through First Landing on the Moon is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooksFree Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture http://bit.ly/2WUB12G
via Ilumina

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

We admire Johannes Vermeer’s  Girl with a Pearl Earring   for many reasons , not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he would have been more concerned with the brushstrokes constituting only a small part of the image. But even Vermeer himself could have perceived only so much detail of the painting that would become his masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU Now, more than 350 years after its completion, we can get a closer view of Girl with a Pearl Earring  than anyone has before through a newly released  10 billion-pixel panorama . At this resolution, writes Petapixel’s Jason Schneider , we can “see the painting down to the level of 4.4-microns per pixel.” Undertaken by Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier of 3D microscope maker Hirox Europe ...

Board Game Ideology — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #108

https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/partiallyexaminedlife/PMP_108_10-7-21.mp3 As board games are becoming increasingly popular with adults, we ask: What’s the relationship between a board game’s mechanics and its narrative? Does the “message” of a board game matter? Your host Mark Linsenmayer is joined by game designer Tommy Maranges , educator Michelle Parrinello-Cason , and ex-philosopher Al Baker to talk about re-skinning games, designing player experiences, play styles, game complexity, and more. Some of the games we mention include Puerto Rico, Monopoly, Settlers of Catan, Sorry, Munchkin, Sushi Go, Welcome To…, Codenames, Pandemic, Occam Horror, Terra Mystica, chess, Ticket to Ride, Splendor, Photosynthesis, Spirit Island, Escape from the Dark Castle, and Wingspan. Some articles that fed our discussion included: “ The Board Games That Ask You to Reenact Colonialism ” by Luke Winkie “ Board Games Are Getting Really, Really Popular ” by Darron Cu...