Robert McNees
The Astronomy Picture of the Day website posted its first picture #OTD in 1995. It was a computer-generated image of how Earth would bend starlight if it had the density of a neutron star.
The APOD (on here as @APoD) is 28 years old today. 28 years old! A fixture of my daily online routine has been around for over a quarter-century.
Robert McNees
For comparison, Megan Thee Stallion, "Stranger Things" actress Natalia Dyer, NBA All-star Giannis Antetokounmpo, and MLB unicorn Shohei Ohtani are all currently 28 years old.
Robert McNees
An awful lot has changed since that first APOD post!
In 1995 our best image of Pluto was a Hubble capture, taken about a year before APOD’s first post. That was only six months or so after the initial service mission (STS-61) to repair Hubble's flawed optics!
Image: Alan Stern (SRI), Marc Buie (Lowell), NASA and ESA
Robert McNees
Compare that with this more recent image, originally posted on APOD in 2015, showing an enhanced-color view based on images captured by the New Horizons spacecraft.
Image Credit: NASA, Johns Hopkins Univ./APL, Southwest Research Inst.
Robert McNees
A real “how it started / how it's going" for APOD!
simonbp
@mcnees and you're mostly seeing the camera PSF there, not the disk of Pluto. Marc Buie's Pluto map back then used some very heroic forward modeling, but did successfully detect the "bright spot" that we now know is Sputnik.
Interestingly enough, he's going back and redoing it now, since his images from the 1990s had coverage of the parts of Pluto that New Horizons wasn't able to see in the flyby.
Jeroen Baert
@mcnees @APoD @frankdeboosere kijk hoe retro
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