Apod.nasa.gov |link| Instant

You realize that the light hitting your retina from that APOD image of the Triangulum Galaxy left its source shortly after the dinosaurs died out. It has been traveling through the vacuum of spacetime for 65 million years, only to end its journey on your sofa.

Every day, like a diligent cosmic librarian, NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) pulls a single volume from an infinite shelf. It hands it to us—not with a whisper, but with a high-resolution shout across the internet. apod.nasa.gov

One day, you are looking at the rusty, swirling dust devils of Mars, captured by a rover no human has ever touched. The next day, you are staring at the Veil Nebula, a wispy, angry ribbon of gas that is actually the expanding corpse of a star that died 8,000 years ago. You see the Pillars of Creation, towering fingers of interstellar dust where stars are being born like bubbles in a boiling pot, and then the next morning, you see a photograph of a literal "hole" in the sun—a coronal hole the size of fifty Earths. You realize that the light hitting your retina