I'm a huge fan of detailed “behind the scenes” stories that describe how something came about or how a group of people managed to achieve something. One amazing story that fits this category is the making of a map of the moon for the National Geographic. At that time, it was a huge technical and logistical challenge to create a detailed map of both sides of the moon.

Richard Furno, one of the authors of the map, outlines the whole story (together with some background information on the space race) rather nicely in two blogs posts that were created from a keynote he held:

Race To The Moon with Richard Furno, Part 1 and Part 2.

You can also look at and zoom into the map itself

(via Spreeblick)