On April 11, 1970, at 13:13 CST Apollo 13 was launched from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, but the lunar landing was aborted after an oxygen tank exploded two days later, crippling the service module upon which the Command Module depended. Despite great hardship caused by limited power, loss of cabin heat, shortage of potable water, and the critical need to jury-rig the carbon dioxide removal system, the crew returned safely to Earth on April 17.
394 years ago, famous astronomer Johannes Kepler discovered the 3rd and also last of his planetary laws, and concluded the general revolution of our celestial world that started with Nikolaus Kopernikus about 100 years earlier. And that made him rather popular as he still is today. Did you know that there is a Kepler crater on the Moon, a Kepler crater on Mars, a Kepler asteroid, a Kepler supernova, of course there has to be a space mission named after him, even an opera
Every story on OPS is a story a contributor heard from someone else. These stories have been overheard and misheard, told and re-told and sometimes refined over time.
"Our interests extend to the wondrous, the curious, the singular, the esoteric, the arcane, and the sometimes hazy frontier between the plausible and the implausible." a whacky collection
"Historiophoty" is Robert Rosentstone's term for our representing history visually and filmically; in contrast, according to White, is "historiography," representing history verbally, in prose.
narrative+history+pictures+encyclopedia; "safe, fast and fun way to learn the real story behind historic events, famous people, heroic exploits, legends, disasters, movies, plus topics of current and general interest"
a science game: "a virtual Darwinian aquarium .. you initiate a primordial soup, and .. check up on what Virtual Mother Nature is up to - about every 15 min. (or every few days)"
a very large historical archive, often from advertising, "to provide for all levels of possible viewer a visually orientated taxonomy of the ways in which pictures are used to tell stories." unique collection, also useful for many other purposes
"a large and sprawling collection of photographs of cultural or humanized landscapes. The images are arranged geographically and are narratively sequenced and captioned to reflect the interests of a geographer."
longstanding and well maintained site by Internet humanities pioneer, George P. Landow. Organized by country and by conceptual approaches. Courses linked to. Useful internal search engine.