Hank Green has made something really cool. Called the Artemis II Photo Timeline, it’s an interactive way to scroll through photos from NASA’s recent crewed mission to cislunar space — but pinned to NASA’s official schedule of the mission.
It is also a tribute to publicly available data. Though the timeline includes some videos published to Instagram and YouTube, the vast majority are images from Flickr. NASA usually uploads them with EXIF data intact, and Flickr preserves it. NASA also provided the mission schedule and, even better, has a public API for the position of the Orion spacecraft at any given time. Which means Green was also able to correlate the photos with where they were taken along the craft’s trajectory.
But why are these images on Flickr? Anil Dash explains:
Here’s the TL;DR:
- Flickr comes from (and helped start!) the Web 2.0 era, which was based on users having control over their data
- Tools at that time began giving creators the power to decide what license they wanted to release their content under, including permissions about how it could be shared, used, or remixed
- Because the people who made platforms back then were users and creators themselves, they thought about the long term and wanted to be able to preserve people’s work
- After lots of corporate shuffling, Flickr ended up in the hands of a family-owned company, SmugMug, and they made the Flickr Foundation to preserve public photos for the next 100 years
- NASA’s images should only be on a service where they can be stored in full resolution, for the long term, dedicated to the public domain — which the other social media apps of today can’t do
Did you know that which astronaut took which photo is not public? Hank Green explains:
A previous version of this site showed some data on which astronaut took which photo, but it was brought to my attention that the four astronauts together agreed that they did not want credit for any photos taken on the mission. I’m somewhat conflicted about this because this project is about giving as much context as possible, but of course there is also something very beautiful about not wanting to take individual credit for something that was the result of so much collaboration.