Just to finish up this subject, an aerospace company named STK has put
together some particularly nice animations (using their software) of the 1970
Apollo 13 mission, in part I'm sure to demonstrate what can be done with
their product and in part to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the mission.

Each of the animations is an MPEG file, generally 2 to 5MB in size, so
they're a little slow to download. Nonetheless, they're not bad. I am fairly
impressed. The best of the animations are these:

A trajectory diagram of the actual flight path flown:

     http://www.stk.com/special/Apollo13/images/A13Full.mpg

The oxygen bottle explosion:

     http://www.stk.com/special/Apollo13/images/A13Explo-2.mpg

The flyby of the Moon:

     http://www.stk.com/special/Apollo13/images/A13Moon.mpg

and the release of LM an hour and a half prior to re-entry into the Earth's
atmosphere:

     http://www.stk.com/special/Apollo13/images/A13DumpLM.mpg

For at least the Windows Media Player, if you stop the animation at least
once during its initial run, you can then play it over and over again. If you
don't, it will disappear at the end of its run and you have to re-launch it
from the hyperlink.

If nothing else, these animations demonstrate the kind of computing power
that exists now on your desktop. One of the things that was often said with
great pride during the Apollo missions is that they were able to put a
computer on board that previously would have occupied a whole room and cost
millions of dollars. Nowadays, you can hold that same power in your hand.

Wirt Atmar

PS: Several people have asked what "MWOTS" stands for. It's "More Wildly
Off-topic Stuff."