OH WOW LOOK AT THAT SPACE PICTURE

June 15, 2015 1:24 PM

20 years of space photos: an oral history of Astronomy Picture of the Day
posted by Brandon Blatcher (12 comments total)

I LOVE that site! Go to their archives and check out the postings for April 1st each year.
posted by TDavis at 1:44 PM on June 15, 2015

Under the hood, how does APOD work?

Robert Nemiroff: I just open up Microsoft Word on my PC. I bring up the text file from an old APOD post from a couple of days ago. I delete out the old stuff, I put the new stuff in, then I transfer it to [the network at] NASA Goddard and I look it over, and with the VI editor I make changes, because I almost always make some kind of mistake somewhere. And then I look at the result and see if it looks reasonable, and if so then I just leave it alone.

No no no.

I love APOD.

I used to have some Unix plugin that grabbed that day's photo and made it my desktop without me needing to do it, but then one day it stopped working and I got rid of it.

I wish all of the photos were NASA photos (and public domain), but it's nice seeing other people's work up there as well.
posted by cjorgensen at 1:45 PM on June 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Whoa. How many people can say they've used the same CMS for two decades?
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 1:57 PM on June 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I probably have a CD with pictures from APD (and Orbiter and a virtual space atlas I can't remember now) somewhere in a box. Before wikipedia and google, it was one of the best sources for "waaaah" photos
posted by lmfsilva at 2:04 PM on June 15, 2015

Ugh. That's a horrifying workflow for managing a website, especially one with thousands of pages that all have the same layout. I'm always amazed to hear that people still do sites that way—and by how resistant they are to improving that workflow, even when it's easy to learn and has a high payoff (say, using Dreamweaver libraries).

But, hey—he's the one suffering for it, not me. And I've certainly enjoyed APOD over the years. So I guess he can use whatever horrendously broken workflow he likes :)
posted by escape from the potato planet at 2:04 PM on June 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Everyone seems to have an apod script. Nowadays I just right click in firefox and "set as desktop background" when I see a particularly good one. My favourite still has to be the curiosity selfie. Everything about it is utterly fantastic. There should be print of it hanging beside (or perhaps in front of) the mona lisa.
posted by Poldo at 2:05 PM on June 15, 2015

I used to show users APOD as a source for great wallpapers, as well as look how cool the Internet is. It's still awesome. Thanks for posting.
posted by theora55 at 2:22 PM on June 15, 2015

These sites are done by people who do not hava sense of aesthetics, sadly.
posted by RalphiePL at 3:21 PM on June 15, 2015

Awesomeness.

Previously, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7...
posted by motty at 10:32 PM on June 15, 2015

Yes but how many years of space hobos?
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:30 AM on June 16, 2015

They have a sense of aesthetics. It's different from yours. And it's been up and running for 20 years. And it works on Lync, it worked on Mosiac, it worked on IE 4. It just worked.

I bet even todays APOD would load in a 15 year old browser. The way the whole goddamn internet was supposed to work.
posted by DigDoug at 6:15 AM on June 16, 2015 [9 favorites]

Metafilter: The way the whole goddamn internet was supposed to work.
posted by Smedleyman at 12:38 PM on June 16, 2015 [2 favorites]