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Sometimes I’ll leave Wednesday to the night before in case there’s some kind of breaking news. I’ll do most of my week maybe on Thursday or Friday, sometimes on Saturday or Sunday. Robert Nemiroff: I usually do the beginnings of the weeks and Jerry does the ends of the weeks, and Wednesday can go either way.
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What kind of routine do you maintain to update the site daily? I like the idea that it’s very simple, it’s still very bytes-small.
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Jerry Bonnell: Boy that was a breakthrough for me in HTML coding, when I learned how to center something. "That was a breakthrough for me in HTML coding, when I learned how to center something." You might notice the 1995 ones the picture’s not centered, because there was no center tag. It’s pretty much been the same since 1995. There’s one image, and that’s the image of the day. If we were to change our structure it would cause a domino effect down the line. We’re translated into 20 different languages, and there’s also apps and things like that that read our files. Don’t worry, I’ll do it for free!" And so far we’ve declined all those requests, because it’s functional. Robert Nemiroff: Maybe a couple times a year we get emails from somebody who says, "I’m a web designer, your page is out of date. It reminds me of Craigslist it serves a purpose so well that it doesn't need to look any different. The design of the site really hasn't changed much at all. And then I look at the result and see if it looks reasonable, and if so then I just leave it alone. I delete out the old stuff, I put the new stuff in, then I transfer it to 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. I bring up the text file from an old APOD post from a couple of days ago. Robert Nemiroff: I just open up Microsoft Word on my PC. I’m always on the lookout for a picture that you could never see with your eyes. I’m still impressed at the imaging we can do beyond the visual spectrum. 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. We were working in an energy regime that’s way beyond visual wavelengths. Jerry Bonnell: When Bob and I started doing APOD we were both gamma ray astronomers. Isn’t that cool?" So we thought maybe something we could do was take these images and explain them one after the next. It would say, "Look at this, it’s colorful and something astronomical. 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. One idea, we thought, was maybe we can make lots of money, and buy a Hawaiian island or something. But the web was growing up, and so we brainstormed to try to figure out how we could contribute to this web. Robert Nemiroff: Jerry Bonnell and I shared an office at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and we were both - we’re still - active researchers. So where did the idea originally come from? This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. How do they do it? A combination of Microsoft Word, a fiery passion for astrophotography, and lots and lots of emails.

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.
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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.ĪPOD launched on June 16, 1995. There's an Instagram account, countless apps, and there's even a dedicated subreddit. 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. That's accompanied by a short description with some links for anyone who wants to dig a little deeper. Every day - the site updates at 12AM ET - there's one featured image (or video) of our cosmos. APOD has been around longer than Google or CraigslistĪPOD serves its titular purpose with minimal flare.
