Astronomy Picture of the Day is is 28 years old today

I've yet to find a better source for desktop pictures/wallpapers.

Cassini images are probably the prettiest, IMO. The shots of large telescopes on the ground are always a bit inspiring.

And the writeups really are nice - IANAA, so it's good to know a /bit/ about what one's looking at.

APOD is great. I'd love to hear an overview of the various ways it's published and their choices on how. The ways to publish "daily interesting stuff" have changed so many times in 28 years.

I read it in Feedly, using a third party RSS feed with larger images. https://acme.com/jef/apod/

It was probably a couple of years before this that I first understood how powerful the internet could be, when my dad showed me a picture taken by a satellite, and in the background you could see the stars. Here was a crummy beige PC on my dad’s desk, talking to robots in space. Wasted most of my time after that on Usenet and IRC, admittedly, but that was definitely when I caught the bug.

For a while, I had an Automator script that would set my desktop to the APoD even night. I need to go resurrect that. It was so much better than just accepting the default all the time.

I found the comparison to the age of movie and sports stars extremely obnoxious. Pluto comparison is on point, start with that!

Is there a recent render of the "earth as neutron star" picture?