APOD Outages

Over the past few days the Washington D.C. area (and others) were affected by a Derecho - a violent, straight-line, wind storm. It has caused considerable damage including knocking out power to over 1 million people. The power outage has affected Goddard Space Flight Centre and the result is that the main Astronomy Picture of the Day server is offline.

I hadn't appreciated that the storm would affect me over here in Wales. Yesterday lunchtime some comments on Twitter alerted me to the problem. I quickly discovered that the main server was down and then saw that the mirror sites were stuck on 30th June. Over on the Starship Asterisk forum I found the thread about the power outages. As the day progressed, the world-wide network of people who run the APOD mirror sites manually updated them so that people could get their daily dose of astronomy.

The power outages are still affecting APOD so all the mirror sites are being manually updated as the people who run them wake up. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

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Posted in astro blog by Stuart on Monday 02nd Jul 2012 (10:16 BST) | 28 Comments | Permalink

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