Aphelion

I made a video of all the Aphelion covers (that I could find, anyway) and posted it on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i15WAi5qxsA

I think we forget all the hard work Rob Wynne put in on these and how many really beautiful images he found. In fact, as a testament to just how long-lived Aphelion is, there have been so many covers that even giving only a few seconds for each one (including the transitions), it still plays for over 8 minutes.

Beautiful images; I recognized a lot of those from APOD (our tax dollars at work) and was even able to name a few. Nice music, too.

One problem; a lot of them were out of focus, especially at the beginning.

I almost never see the covers myself; my bookmark brings me directly to the forum.

Well, I couldn't justify doing it in HD for just still images that only have so much resolution to begin with...

You really should with the covers. Books and Magazines start with a cover. Plus, you should look since I've done the last 5. (That's also why I've started posting the cover in the forum and on Facebook when I flip the issue.)

The early covers *are* lower quality, and it's not an accident.

The very first cover was Aphelion #17, dated October 1998. In 1998, almost everyone on the Internet was using dialup, and most of those people were at 28.8k or 14.4k. (The first 56k modems had just been released that year.)

As a result, most web design was focused on making things smaller, for faster load times. It was no good having an image on the landing page that took 30s to a minute to download. People would surf away from your page if it didn't load in under 10seconds, and people often tried for under 5s for load time as a best practice.

So, the image quality was sacrificed in the name of speed. As more and more people got on broadband, the need to compress the image to the fullest extent possible became less, and eventually I stopped optimising them as heavily.