Email Signup: Astronomy Picture of The Day

I recently had a request from my father to change the Internet. Change what?!? Yes, the Internet. You see, there are certain daily tasks that my father has that involve visiting various websites. Sometimes it as simple as visiting the site to see what has changed. However, the burden is on the individual to pull from the website. That is, every day my dad needs to open up a browser, scroll through his bookmarks, and click on the site he wishes to visit. But wouldn't it be nice if that site could push the information out? Every time the site changes, my father could be notified of the changes! There are lots of websites that already do this in the form of a mailing list, but what do you do when the site you are interested in doesn't have a mailing list?

One such site my father enjoys visiting is a NASA site that posts a new astronomy picture every day along with a brief description. It even provides a little teaser for the picture to be posted the following day! This seemed to be a great excuse for creating a push mechanism. I've developed a Perl script that runs each afternoon. It's sole job is to collect the data from the NASA site and send it to him in an email.

After a few dinner conversations, family visits, and enough "hey, where'd you get that picture?" comments, it started to catch on and the distribution list has grown modestly. In response to the interest, I decided to create this form to automate the process of being added (or removed) from the list. If you'd like to be added, please fill out the form below and click the submit button. If you'd like to see a sample email (today's), check it out here.

Note: There seems to be some concern about privacy. Although I don't have an official privacy statement, this is a harmless project I created as a graduate student that was simply a fun gift to my dad. I'm not selling anyones email address...

Note: Your email reader must be able to read messages sent in the HTML format in order for you to view these pictures. Clients that I know work: Outlook, Eudora, Netscape, Mozilla, MSN, and the web interfaces of Yahoo and AT&T Worldnet.

There are currently 434 people on the distribution list!