Say what you will about Star Trek Into Darkness, but the warp effects in that movie are irresistible. When J.J. Abrams' USS Enterprise explodes into space, its blue-white contrails leaving interstellar streamers in its wake, your whole being rejoices. But here's a sad thought: You know the Enterprise from the original Star Trek series, the one everyone fell in love with? The blueprint from which all future Enterprises were built? The classic studio model by art director Matt Jefferies that served Gene Roddenberry so well until it was replaced by one from Industrial Light & Magic? In other words, the One True Enterprise? It never got to blast off like that. When it jumped to warp, nothing much happened at all.

Of course, that's due to TV budgets and special effects being what they were—or weren't—in the '60s. Star Trek’s creators had to rely on cheaper methods, like verbal cues (Kirk announcing the warp factor) or goofy tricks (that semi-transparent flickering in "The Cage"), to tell viewers the Enterprise was traveling faster than light. But it's 2015, and it'd be cool to see Jefferies' beloved original basking in the glare (if not the Abramsian lens flare) of modern visuals, like those groovy neon streaks that signaled warp-drive engagement in 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Well—and maybe you suspected this was coming—we finally can. Thanks to Nick Acosta, a professional illustrator and concept artist in San Francisco, the One True Enterprise of 1965 can be seen in a variety of cool settings, including that '79 scene Acosta calls "one of my favorite effects shots of all time."

It started when he saw an article earlier this year about the Smithsonian conserving the treasured relic: an 11-foot icon of TV history that still looks shipshape 50 years later. Paramount donated it to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in 1974, where it's been a highlight over the years. But now that the model's being moved to the new Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall, it's off display until June 2016.

For a press event, the museum provided a bunch of hi-res photos of the model. Acosta realized he could snip the Enterprise from those images and stitch it into shots from the Star Trek movies. It wasn't easy—the angles had to match, and the fluorescent lighting in the press shots wasn't ideal—but Acosta eventually found eight scenes from Star Trek’s cinematic history.

Then the fun began. "Every shot has a sort of texture, dirt that's almost microscopic," Acosta says, explaining how he had to balance the lighting, blend colors, and—sneaky sneaky—flip some images. He averaged about eight hours on each composite, though the shot from the beginning of Into Darkness where the starship rises out of water took closer to 12. (He understands, but seems to discount, purists' complaints that the Enterprise doesn't belong in water. He also has no problems with Abrams' controversial design for his computer-generated Enterprise.) Another challenge was the scene from Wrath of Khan. The colors in his Blu-ray reissue were miserably washed out, so he had to refer to old movie stills to get the richness of the nebula just right.

An animation of Acosta's compositing process. Nick Acosta

A week before posting the results online, Acosta nervously told his father, himself a fan, that he wasn't sure they were any good. Thankfully, Dad disagreed—and so did the Internet. "You know you're on to something when the Reddit comments aren't 80 percent negative," Acosta says. "I'm not the only one who fantasizes about seeing the old model in a feature film that has maybe 30 times the budget that the episode was in." Even the ILM visual effects artist who worked on the Abrams movies tweeted his support:

Acosta, who studied illustration at the Academy of Art University, enjoyed a similar reaction last year when he transformed panning shots from the original Star Trek into single Cinerama widescreen images. "You always remember something as more epic and beautiful than the actual shot," Acosta says. "And then you try to watch and it's not the same." Ditto the Enterprise: As satisfying as it is to re-watch TOS, it's a bit like returning to the neighborhood pool you enjoyed as a kid—in your adulthood, it feels more like a bathtub. With Acosta's images, you see the Enterprise in her full, mystical, timeless glory.

"If Star Trek is listening," Acosta says, "this would make a tremendous calendar."