Background

The Great Canadian Hairy Star Party was an educational initiative produced by ScienceWeb in 1996. It featured observations, sketches, and other artwork from students across Canada related to Comet Hyakutake, a spectacular comet that passed close to Earth in March of that year. Centre Consolidated Elementary School in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia participated by having students submit their personal observations on a dedicated website.

I was one of those students.

The servers hosting the original content were decommissioned in the early 2000s, and much of the data was lost. A few remnants of the effort remain in the following locations:

  • The project is mentioned on the CM Bulletin Board, Volume III, Number 14 — March 14, 1997.
  • Some partial snapshots can be found on the Wayback Machine, but you need to know the exact URLs to find them, and some elements are either missing or corrupted.

I recently successfully recovered the page and have hosted it at the link above for posterity. It is a nostalgic glimpse into the early days of the web, before the era of big social media and large language models, when the internet was a more personal and creative space for individuals to share their passions and projects.

Restoration Process

I attempted to preserve the original page as faithfully as possible. Here’s the process I followed to recover it.

  • I started with an old box of hard drives and USB sticks in my basement, vaguely recalling I had a copy of the original files somewhere. After some digging, I found an old hard drive labeled “Travis very old Toshiba HD”. I connected it to my computer using a SATA-to-USB adapter like this:

Figure 1
Figure 1. This did not work.

corrupted drive

  • It didn’t work on my MacBook. Elena patiently allowed me to try on her Windows machines—no luck. I tried a few different adapters and cables, but the drive was not recognized by any of the machines.
  • I had partitioned that drive into two parts while in grad school (including a small Linux partition to run ROS), so I think that may have contributed to the issue.

recovery

  • I was able to get power to the drive and recover the content using the Cleverfiles Disk Drill recovery tool. It took roughly three hours of rummaging through over 300 GB of partially organized data, but I eventually found the original files and most of the associated assets.
  • Several image assets (mainly GIFs) were partially corrupted and could not be repaired.

reconstruction

  • Fortunately, the .htm file was intact, and I was able to extract the original URL: http://www.scienceweb.org/astro/comet/kids/ccs73.html.
  • Having this URL allowed me to find older versions of the files on the Wayback Machine archive.
  • One remaining asset (west.gif) was not available in the archive. Based on the filename and context, I found what I believe to be a copy of the original image here.
  • I made only minor edits to the .htm file to enable hosting on my own server.

Result

The result is a near-faithful reconstruction of the original, very 90’s style page.