20 years of space photos: an oral history of Astronomy Picture of the Day

Exploring the cosmos one day at a time

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Try to name as many websites as you can that are more than 20 years old.

It's not that easy, right? As someone who was around for the arrival of the World Wide Web, even I have trouble remembering what was around in those early days. Google didn't start until 1997. Angelfire and Craigslist launched in 1996.

Others, like Pets.com, didn't make it. But 20 years ago this week, in an office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, gamma ray astronomers Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell created a simple website that still thrives today: the Astronomy Picture of the Day, or APOD.

APOD serves its titular purpose with minimal flare. Every day — the site updates at 12AM ET — there's one featured image (or video) of our cosmos. That's accompanied by a short description with some links for anyone who wants to dig a little deeper.

The site is available in 20 languages, has a Twitter account with a million followers, a Google+ page — don't scoff, the astrophotography community actually thrives there — with over 900,000 fans, and nearly 200,000 likes on Facebook. There's an Instagram account, countless apps, and there's even a dedicated subreddit. All that helps account for more than 1 million visits to the APOD website each day – a far cry from the first day 20 years ago when it barely cracked a dozen.

APOD launched on June 16, 1995. In advance of its milestone birthday, I spoke on the phone with the two guys who have run the site by hand for two decades, a seemingly unfathomable task in the age of ephemeral content. How do they do it? A combination of Microsoft Word, a fiery passion for astrophotography, and lots and lots of emails.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.


So where did the idea originally come from?

Robert Nemiroff: Jerry Bonnell and I shared an office at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and we were both — we’re still — active researchers. But the web was growing up, and so we brainstormed to try to figure out how we could contribute to this web. One idea, we thought, was maybe we can make lots of money, and buy a Hawaiian island or something. But that never worked out. [Laughs.]

So we were getting these emails that had these image attachments, sometimes about the Hubble Space Telescope, sometimes from something else, and the people sending these emails had no idea what that was. It would say, "Look at this, it’s colorful and something astronomical. Isn’t that cool?" So we thought maybe something we could do was take these images and explain them one after the next.

Jerry Bonnell: When Bob and I started doing APOD we were both gamma ray astronomers. We were working in an energy regime that’s way beyond visual wavelengths [of light]. So we have a very broad concept of what an "image" might be, and I think we’ve translated that to some degree into APOD. I’m still impressed at the imaging we can do beyond the visual spectrum. I’m always on the lookout for a picture that you could never see with your eyes.

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.

On the left, the first ever APOD post. On the right, a recent one from June of 2015.

The design of the site really hasn't changed much at all. It reminds me of Craigslist; it serves a purpose so well that it doesn't need to look any different.

Robert Nemiroff: Maybe a couple times a year we get emails from somebody who says, "I’m a web designer, your page is out of date. Don’t worry, I’ll do it for free!" And so far we’ve declined all those requests, because it’s functional. We’re translated into 20 different languages, and there’s also apps and things like that that read our files. If we were to change our structure it would cause a domino effect down the line. It’s just simple. There’s one image, and that’s the image of the day.

It’s pretty much been the same since 1995. You might notice the 1995 ones the picture’s not centered, because there was no center tag. So we did upgrade to the center tag. But we haven’t done much else.

Jerry Bonnell: Boy that was a breakthrough for me in HTML coding, when I learned how to center something.

The design has evolved very little. I like the idea that it’s very simple, it’s still very bytes-small.

What kind of routine do you maintain to update the site daily?

Robert Nemiroff: I usually do the beginnings of the weeks and Jerry does the ends of the weeks, and Wednesday can go either way.

I will do several in a row. I’ll do most of my week maybe on Thursday or Friday, sometimes on Saturday or Sunday. Sometimes I’ll leave Wednesday to the night before in case there’s some kind of breaking news. Jerry will do the ends of the weeks, he usually waits until the night before, and works on it during the afternoon.

Both Jerry and I, we surf the web all the time anyway incessantly, we can’t stop it. If APOD was to die tomorrow we would still be surfing the web and saying, "Oh, that’s a cool astronomy image." So I’ve accumulated some that I’ve seen, many were submitted. People submit a lot of images.

Jerry Bonnell: I get ideas at all times, and I try to pay attention to things coming in and what’s going on in astronomy. Ideas tend to present themselves. I would say it’s unusual to have things queued up a week in advance. We usually run only a few days in advance. But that’s one of the things that I’ve enjoyed and still enjoy about APOD over the years.

Robert Nemiroff: If, however, there’s a very topical image that comes out, then it’s understood that either of us will stop what we’re doing and work until they’ve created an APOD post based on that image, move it over to NASA Goddard, and then it will be in the queue for the "robot" to update at midnight Eastern time.

Do you have a favorite type of image that you look forward to seeing on the site?

Robert Nemiroff: I just like the stuff where you look at it and say "Wow, what’s that!" I’m somewhat jaded after 20 years. It has to work for me before I try to make it work for other people.

Jerry Bonnell: I seem to be a sucker for the big, beautiful spiral galaxy images.

How does the process of searching for the right image compare to 20 years ago?

Jerry Bonnell: We used to use the pretty pictures that came from observatories and NASA, stuff like that, for the picture of the day. But now I think it’s much more heavily weighted toward the amateur communities and non-institutional imaging.

We get tons of images submitted, so now I have to spend much of my day looking through my email, whereas it didn’t used to be that way. I used to have to be more proactive. I would explore what was online and available in the NASA archives online, and I would also make occasional trips to photo libraries that I could find at Goddard and NASA headquarters and look at the prints.

Hubble

How closely tied is that rise in submissions related to the amateur astrophotography boom?

Jerry Bonnell: It’s really been driven by the rise of CCD [sensor] technology. You used to have to have institutional budgets to afford those, now you can just buy these things off the shelf. It’s become more of a garage-level kind of technology. It makes the application of it a lot more creative by the amateur community. They can think of their own ideas, they can devote their own time. They don’t have to apply for observing time at a telescope. That, and the fact that we have very powerful computers sitting on the desktop or being carried around in people’s pockets.

Robert Nemiroff: Amateur astrophotographers have gotten much better, and they’re just doing amazing stuff. Easily the ones we’re rejecting today, if we had seen those in 1997 we would've said, "This is great, we’re going to put this up!" But things that in 1997 would have been wonderful, we just have better images now.

Really good amateur astrophotographers, they’re always taking great images and always outdoing themselves. They have more time to look deeper with more detail. Cell phones are capturing things like meteors that wouldn’t have been found before, and we're getting dash cam images of meteors coming in through the atmosphere. Technology is providing much better images than before, some unexpected images.

I can't imagine you running out of images to post now, but was there ever a time in the early days where you thought you might not be able to keep this up?

Jerry Bonnell: In the early days we were criticized by our colleagues for this idea, you know — how could we come up with an image a day? I think Bob and I both had the thought that we could certainly come up with an image a day, but we were in danger of maybe becoming the "lunar orbiter" image of the day website. That was what was really accessible.

Robert Nemiroff: Before we posted our first image we debated this, Jerry and I, as to whether we were going to run out of images in a few days and then say, "Well that was stupid." But actually there were many images around even back then. And NASA’s Ranger series took tens of thousands of images of the lunar surface, so if we had to we could just start putting up other pictures of the lunar surface. "Here’s another crater that’s a little bit different than yesterday’s crater." But we never ran out of images. We always had interesting images, and as time went on we were sent more and more images. And now we reject 10 to 1, so for every image you see we’ve rejected 10.

Robert Nemiroff (left) and Jerry Bonnell (right) at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in 2007

You've built a really simple site that seems like it can last forever, and you're definitely not going to run out of images any time soon. Where does APOD go from here?

Robert Nemiroff: I’d like to think that APOD is more of an idea than just a website. I would hope that the concept would live on past Jerry and me, and that when images come out that are astronomy-based and the talk of the day, that becomes the "astronomy picture of the day" and is posted somewhere with at least a minimal explanation so people who are not necessarily part of the astronomy crowd or space enthusiasts can understand what’s going on. I hope it goes many years, and we’re considered to be just the first people to do this.

Websites come and go. I remember when the greatest search engine I ever saw came on called Altavista. I told Jerry, "This is the best one! I don’t know why there would ever be a better search engine than Altavista. This is going to live forever." Now I don’t know if it’s even still there. We feel lucky. We’re going to make it to 20, anything else is icing on the cake.

Jerry Bonnell: I don’t think I’ve ever contemplated the endgame. I’m not feeling particularly mortal right now. [Laughs.]

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