The Artemis II crew returned to Earth on my birthday this year. I followed the mission on the sideline while it was going on, but I never really had time to just sit down and dig into it. This weekend I finally took that time and then I got inspired to build a small site for the amazing footage brought home, which I’m calling Cosmic Plates.
Why did I make this?
Something I really enjoy is spending time with material about space, the cosmos, our universe (hence the name “xoPlanet”). Both from a scientific angle and just the footage itself. Looking at pictures and wondering what I make of them. And Artemis II had a lot of wonderful footage.
Scrolling through the official mission website, I took time to notice the small details. The little bag they all wear at the armpits. The different patches on their clothes. The caps they have on, which turn out to be quite a unique and historical headpiece. I tried to zoom in on details inside the ship, reading text that is upside down on buttons and panels. Putting the mission into some kind of mental perspective: what it must feel like to be thrown out of the Earth’s gravity field, captured by the Moon’s, and thrown back again. When you just read about it, you don’t really have a sense of the time. But spending time with the photos, recognising details between them, I felt unexpectedly close to it.
I wanted to print them
So of course I wanted to print some of them. I often want to do this with good footage. Hang it on a wall, or make a nice wallpaper for my computer. But I wanted it wrapped in a layout with some context: what is going on in this picture, why was it taken, how far into the mission was it?
You can go look that up, of course. And sometimes NASA itself has posters. But if you’re not close by, ordering can get expensive. And honestly, whenever I buy prints from museums, the quality is often lower than I’d expect. Which is kind of strange, because you’d think they have access to the highest quality files. Somewhere between somebody getting the task and the thing getting sent to print, quality gets lost in compression. I’m not a print specialist, but I can see it.
I have access to a printer. I’m sure plenty of other people do too. If only there was a good file, with a good resolution, a proper layout that didn’t look like somebody threw it together in high school (to be fair, I think many space-themed layouts do), and which was rich in context.
But to my knowledge, this doesn’t exist. So this weekend I attempted to build it.
What Cosmic Plates is
As I went through the material and watched a bunch of behind-the-scenes footage, I started highlighting images I wanted to print. And then I made a small system where I can produce layouts in a relatively quick way. The layouts are coded in HTML and pre-processed into PDFs, so the original image doesn’t get re-compressed along the way. It’s the full image as found on Wikimedia (5K, relatively high resolution), unmodified, placed into a layout together with titles and captions adapted from NASA’s official descriptions. Mission times are estimated from the camera timestamps corrected by matching to known times as listed on some of the photo descriptions.
The flow on the site is basically three steps: pick the cards you like to add them to basket, download a single print-ready PDF, an then of course print it. The layouts are optimised for A2 but you’re free to scale them up or down.
The footage is in the public domain, or well, it’s copyrighted, but it’s allowed to be used for many things, including non-commercial and educational purposes. This feels like a fair fit for that. I’m not affiliated with NASA, and I don’t mean to earn any money on it. I just wanted it for myself, and then I thought I may as well share it.
The first series is Artemis II. It covers things like the total solar eclipse seen from Orion, close-ups of the Moon during the lunar flyby, and a few other moments I found myself lingering on.
A caveat about paper sizes
100% fitted the posters to fit cleanly on standard formats like A2 or A3. I optimised the layout to look good and be readable at around A2 size, but since the images have different proportions: Some landscape, some portrait, and even the landscape ones vary. The posters often end up taller than A2 or A3. I didn’t want to crop the images, and I also didn’t want to limit how much context I could add in.
What I’d recommend for now is to print them as large as you can and cut them down afterwards. I know that can be annoying for framing. I didn’t get all the way there yet, because it’s a compromise. I want a nice layout and I want it to be printable without fuss. Right now I’ve prioritised the layout. Let me know what you’d prefer. The alternative is probably to make the images smaller and use the extra room for more context, since I assume nobody wants the images cropped.
What’s next
Right now it’s just Artemis II, but the ambition for Cosmic Plates is of course broader. In the back of my head I’d love to add more. Maybe mission-based, maybe topic-based, like deep space photography from the different telescopes. I haven’t decided whether I’d put all deep space photography under one big topic or split it out by telescope.
I also want the curation to be inviting and approachable, not only for the space-nerdy person but for the more broadly curious person too. That probably means being a bit loose with terminology in the UX itself, and leaning into more archetypical ways of browsing. The posters themselves of course use the correct terminology.
One thing I’m still thinking about is whether to have a single layout across the whole project, or to vary the layout per series so the Artemis II posters, for instance, visually belong together. I’m leaning toward a single standard layout for everything. It feels nice when a series of prints share a common language. But I’ll refine it over time as I come up with new things to include.
Download, print, share
That’s it really. Try it out and if Cosmic Plates is as nice for anyone else as it is for me, that’d make me happy. Download, print, and if you do print, share it with me! I’d genuinely love to see it on a wall somewhere. And if you think there’s footage I’ve missed that should be in there, send me a link. I’ll happily add it.
I’ll post this on Bluesky and Mastodon too, so feel free to jump in there with feedback. Comments will automatically appear on this post.