SATURN V ASCII LAUNCH

01 // Full video

This page plays every frame of NASA's Apollo 11 launch footage (public domain) in truecolor ASCII. The video streams in 2MB chunks, and playback starts once the first one loads. The homepage terminal runs the fastfetch splash this renderer began as.

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READY

02 // The renderer

Based on the shape-vector technique from Alex Harri's "Rendering ASCII Art".

1. SHAPE SAMPLING

s1 s2 s3 s4 s5 s6 CHARACTER CELL

Each cell is split into 6 circular regions whose average brightnesses form a 6-dimensional shape vector (Harri, 2024):

[s1, s2, s3, s4, s5, s6]

A brightness-only renderer cannot separate two equally bright cells, but their shape vectors differ when the light falls in different corners.

2. CHARACTER MATCHING

IMAGE CELL SHAPE VECTOR [.4 .1 .6 .3 .1 .5] min dist COMPARE TO ALL ASCII CHARS: / [.5 .0 .5 .5 .0 .5] d=0.42 \ [.0 .4 .3 .4 .5 .1] d=0.12 | [.5 .5 .5 .5 .5 .5] d=0.68 _ [.0 .0 .0 .0 .9 .9] d=0.91 BEST MATCH: \

Every printable ASCII character (32-126) is pre-rendered and reduced to its own 6-dimensional vector. After a directional comparison with neighbors sharpens edges, each cell takes the nearest character by Euclidean distance (Harri, 2024).

3. ANIMATION PIPELINE

SCROLL 19 frames ease-in t^2 HOLD 3 frames flame flicker DISSIPATE 21 frames wave fade viewport moves up the image RGB + char perturbation top-down sweep chars -> smoke

The viewport scrolls up the full-height ASCII image on a quadratic ease-in.

It then holds while flame-masked cells swap to random characters and jitter RGB each frame.

Last, a top-down wave fades characters through smoke glyphs (. , ` ') to blank and RGB to black.

Harri's full writeup of the shape-vector method: alexharri.com/blog/ascii-rendering