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Tag Archives: Apollo 17

Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 15 – Apollo17.org v1.0 Launched for the Mission’s 43rd Anniversary

Posted on December 2, 2015 by Feist Posted in Project Apollo 17 43 Comments

In time for the 43rd anniversary of Apollo 17, the all new Apollo17.org is now live!

v1.0 Splash Screen

Over the past three months I have completely rebuilt how the site works. My good friend Chris Bennett, who I have worked with on many projects in my professional career, pushed me into new territory when in September he suggested that the mission imagery was far more important and impactful than the mission commentary or transcripts. This simple, and somewhat obvious insight had escaped me. I had worked for so long on rebuilding the transcripts that I couldn’t see past the need to make them the primary part of the experience. He provided a simple design sketch showing what a reprioritized interface might look like. This was an exciting new direction and got me rolling on a complete redesign.

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Apollo Apollo 17

Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 14 – A Fantastic Reception

Posted on September 8, 2015 by Feist Posted in Project Apollo 17 2 Comments

cernan and I

It has been a wild ride since May, when I made public the first alpha release of apollo17.org. Now at v0.6, it’s still an alpha, but has been improved and stabilized over the spring and early summer.

The day the site went live, March 25/2015, Gizmodo picked up the site and I got a massive surge of traffic. Technically everything held together, and I was rewarded with many enthusiastic messages from people experiencing the site for the first time. Super rewarding.

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Apollo Apollo 17

Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 13 – Apollo17.org – Alpha Release v0.1

Posted on March 23, 2015 by Feist Posted in Project Apollo 17 19 Comments

Today I’m happy to announce the public alpha release of Apollo17.org, an interactive explorer that allows you to experience the entire Apollo 17 mission (305 hours long) in real-time. It represents the culmination of the years of mission data cleaning I have blogged about here. My goal is to create a full-featured site that will allow the public to explore and experience the Apollo 17 mission in this way.

Apollo17orgv0.1Version 0.1 is now active which is just a proof of concept. Currently you need a fast computer and a good internet connection to run the experience. Best viewed in Google Chrome (it hasn’t been tested with any other browsers).

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Apollo Apollo 17 Audio Transcripts

Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 12 – YouTube Channel of Complete Mission

Posted on February 13, 2015 by Feist Posted in Project Apollo 17 Leave a comment

It has been an eventful beginning to 2015. In my previous post I went over the new mission audio released by NASA. This audio has been merged into the base project and the resulting transcript corrections have been made.

youtubeOver the years I have been creating Adobe Premiere videos that contain all mission audio and video. These have taken years to make and I intended to only use them for the purposes of correcting the transcript. However, I recently decided to render them out and upload them to YouTube. The resulting YouTube Channel contains 39 videos that are each 8 hours long. It’s pretty incredible that YouTube can house videos of such long duration. I wonder what people’s reactions will be when they stumble across an 8 hour Apollo Mission video without any context.

Much of the video is black with a simple timecode showing Mission Elapsed Time. Without reference to the overall mission or transcripts, the videos leave you a little lost.

Over the coming weeks I plan to create a proof of concept that links the corrected transcript to YouTube video playback.

Apollo Apollo 17 Audio Transcripts

Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 11 – More mission audio released by NASA

Posted on December 14, 2014 by Feist Posted in Project Apollo 17 3 Comments

IMG_2968editDue to the hard work of Greg Wiseman of the Houston Audio Control Room at the Johnson Space Center, more Apollo 17 mission audio has been digitized and released on the Internet Archive. I’m now in the process of laying in the missing clips into the mission reconstruction project and have resumed correcting the Air-to-Ground transcripts.

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Apollo Apollo 17 Audio Transcripts

Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 10 – Manual Transcript Corrections Completed!

Posted on April 5, 2014 by Feist Posted in Project Apollo 17 1 Comment

commitsI can’t tell if I’m the tortoise or the hare, but March 31st was a big day. My github logs show that I started the manual step of the transcript correction process December 1/2012, and completed it March 31/2014 (with big summer breaks in there). There are still many hours of missing audio material, but I’ve been in touch with the Johnson Space Center, Houston Audio Control Room and they’ve been very responsive and helpful. They assured me that the missing material was on their list of to-dos, and they’re aiming to start getting the missing material to me within the next few weeks. It feels good to get to the next step. I don’t need the missing material to begin post-processing of the corrected material. As new audio becomes available, it will mean more manual correction, then the re-running of the automated post-processing actions I’m about to write.

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Apollo Apollo 17 Audio Transcripts

Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 9 – The Trip Home

Posted on March 10, 2014 by Feist Posted in Project Apollo 17 Leave a comment

It has been far too long since my last update on this enormous project. I’ve been toiling away for the past year and am now only a few months away from the end of the current project phase (reconstructing timecode and correcting the transcript).

Last year I made quite a bit of headway in the colder months. The summer was a 3 or 4 month break (it’s nice and warm outside and I’m involved in other things).

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Apollo Apollo 17 Audio Transcripts

Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 8 – Changing The Clocks

Posted on January 27, 2013 by Feist Posted in Project Apollo 17 Leave a comment

It has been a month or so since my last report on my progress. I have been making consistent headway on correcting the transcript while reassembling the timeline in Adobe Premiere as I go. As of today I’ve corrected the transcript to 112:46:30, which is just after they landed on the Moon and got the GO to stay there.

If you take a look at my project on Github you can see my progress in detail.

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Adobe Premiere Apollo Apollo 17 Audio Transcripts

Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 7 – Listening in Real Time

Posted on December 22, 2012 by Feist Posted in Project Apollo 17 1 Comment

I’ve spent many hours now listening in real time to the audio timeline that I have partially reconstructed in Premiere (which I described in my previous post). I’m 21 hours, 48 minutes into the mission (plus the two hours of commentary leading up to the launch). There have been some segments of missing audio and there has been one 6 hour sleep period that contained only occasional Public Affairs Office (PAO) announcements. Continue reading→

Apollo Apollo 17 Jack Schmitt Transcripts

Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 6 – Timeline Reconstruction

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Feist Posted in Project Apollo 17 1 Comment

ROL_5520TWhen tabling and OCRing all of the transcript pages, running python cleanup procedures and manually running search and replace rules, I had a lot of time to think about this project and where it might lead. The underlying thought that I kept coming back to is that I’m re-establishing a cohesive chain of events that occurred over a 13 day period, 40 years ago. Starting from this idea of a chain I expanded my investigation to include other media elements in addition to the transcript. I realized that I would have to reconcile all of the audio recorded, film shot, photos taken, and television broadcast during that 13 day period in order to reconstruct the chain of events.

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Adobe Premiere Apollo Apollo 17 Audio Transcripts

Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 5 – Python Processing

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Feist Posted in Project Apollo 17 Leave a comment

Now that the TEC and PAO transcript data is in pipe-delimited CSV format, I can start to use batch cleansing techniques to further clean the raw OCR output data (CSV) into 2nd phase cleaned CSV. These processes are all automated tasks with no manual intervention. Once again, I did this purposely to keep the string of steps automated all the way from the original OCR steps to the cleaned output CSV in case I ever need to go back and change one of my earlier OCR settings etc. Any manual changes to the data would be wiped out by re-exporting any of the earlier steps.

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Apollo Apollo 17 Processing Python

Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 4 – Technical vs Public Affairs Office

Posted on April 15, 2012 by Feist Posted in Project Apollo 17 1 Comment

There are two different air-to-ground transcripts associated with the Apollo 17 mission, the TEC or Technical Air-to-Ground transcript, and the PAO or Public Affairs Office transcript. These were both separately transcribed to typewritten pages in 1972 even though they contain 80% overlap.
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Apollo Apollo 17

Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 3 – New OCR Techniques

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Feist Posted in Project Apollo 17 Leave a comment

As discussed in my previous post, The Apollo 17 PDFs contained an early attempt at recognizing the typewritten text using Adobe Acrobat’s built in OCR functionality. Working from Adobe’s OCR output would result in a huge amount of manual labour, which kind of defeats the purpose of using OCR to being with.

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ABBYY FineReader 11 Apollo Apollo 17 FineReader 11

Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 2 – Transcript Restoration, A Beginning

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Feist Posted in Project Apollo 17 1 Comment

If you’re interested in this project, have a quick flip through the PDF of the technical air-to-ground mission audio transcript to get an idea of what the source material is like. The raw PDF document was published courtesy Stephen Garber (NASA HQ) and Glen Swanson (JSC) (55MB PDF). These transcripts were originally typed in 1972 by NASA typists.

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Apollo Apollo 17 Spacelog Transcript

Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 1 – Discovering Apollo

Posted on February 18, 2012 by Feist Posted in Project Apollo 17 2 Comments

In 1997 I was a developer at an advertising agency in the early days of the web world. I built interactive kiosks and cd-roms etc with a great team that I’m still friends with today. At that time internet content was thin, almost everything was about creating infrastructure. It was a technology-lead world. Once a technical infrastructure was made, developers looked around for content to fill it with. Everyone needed “content providers”. The cart was leading the horse.

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ALSJ Apollo Apollo 17 Spacelog

Recent Posts

  • From Apollo 17 to NASA May 20, 2019
  • Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 16 – New Apollo17.org, 44th Anniversary Edition December 11, 2016
  • Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 15 – Apollo17.org v1.0 Launched for the Mission’s 43rd Anniversary December 2, 2015
  • Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 14 – A Fantastic Reception September 8, 2015
  • Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 13 – Apollo17.org – Alpha Release v0.1 March 23, 2015
  • Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 12 – YouTube Channel of Complete Mission February 13, 2015
  • Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 11 – More mission audio released by NASA December 14, 2014
  • Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 10 – Manual Transcript Corrections Completed! April 5, 2014
  • Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 9 – The Trip Home March 10, 2014
  • Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 8 – Changing The Clocks January 27, 2013
  • Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 7 – Listening in Real Time December 22, 2012
  • Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 6 – Timeline Reconstruction December 19, 2012
  • Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 5 – Python Processing April 30, 2012
  • Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 4 – Technical vs Public Affairs Office April 15, 2012
  • Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 3 – New OCR Techniques March 30, 2012

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