Today’s example of the Internet being a truly incredible place comes courtesy of a Reddit thread started by Redditor Michael Hindes. Hindes’ family was going through boxes of old photographs left by his late grandparents, when they stumbled across a series of photos of the disastrous 1986 Challenger space shuttle launch. The shuttle exploded shortly after take off, plunging back down to Earth and killing all seven astronauts on board — including school teacher Christa McAuliffe.
Hindes shared the 26 photos, which were actually taken by a friend of his grandfather’s, who was a NASA electrician. The thread quickly hit the front page, while two other Redditors — MisterCommodore and llort_gnik — took it upon themselves to transform the photos into brand new ways of viewing the tragic launch. The former compiled 19 photos into an animated .gif of the launch, while the latter created a composite photo of the entire launch, both of which you see below. The entire gallery can be found here.
[io9]
