A Modest Proposal from a fan...

[BeBop]

Hopefully people who are actually involved with the APOD website will read this, if you agree, please let it be known, maybe they'll consider it...

I love your site! I do have one suggestion/request though...

Regarding the amazing images they post so often, even the "High Rez" version you can look at when clicking on the image itself is not really High Rez enough for the times

When APOD started, lower resolution monitors and dial up modems were still the norm...

I have a new Imac that has a 24" screen and 1920x1200 resolution... I'm not trying to brag, more and more people have such monitors...

I would love to be able to see an even higher resolution image and even use some of those images as desktops or screen savers. I don't think I"m the only one out there that would do the same given the opportunity... Apple even includes some high-rez space images as one of its screen savers on every Mac!

I find the same problem with a lot of the other astronomy related (like any of NASA's telescope) websites... the images are all for the monitor I owned in the 90's

Seeing as it would help start more conversations about astronomy
It would not be such a bad thing right? Connection speeds are higher now so I don't think it would slow the site down too much to include really high rez versions of those great images (especially if only when you clicked on the smaller image on the main page).

Anyway, just a thought... maybe most images aren’t even available at such resolutions or there is some other limitation I’m not thinking of…

Other than that I hope they keep up the great work!

[makc]

higher image resolutions incur additional bandwidth costs. the math is simple, let's say you increase resolution by 50%, then average file size is increased by 1.5x1.5 -1 = 125%. Suppose original image was 100KB and APOD receives 50K daily hits, then 50% increase in image resolution results in 1.25 * 100KB * 50000 which is whooping 6 Gigabytes of extra traffic to deliver essentially the same content.

[astro_uk]

There is another reason why images are presented in certain resolutions. That is simply the size of the image produced by the instrument, the ACS on Hubble for instance produces images of around 4000 x 4000 pixels, there simply isn't any point changing this as it doesn't add any information.

Most other images produced in astronomy are fairly similar, unless they're produced by many offset observations, this generally isn't the case for images shown here though.