About
Who writes this, what they check before publishing, and how the same cards live inside Discord.
How a card gets made
Every card starts as a question someone actually asked - usually in a flat-earth thread - and every fact in it gets written from the cited sources, not from memory. Style is deliberate: arithmetic stays in plain language, researchers get named, and the claim has to survive the sources before it survives into the collection.
Photographs are treated as suspect data until a person has looked at them. Metadata lies: an official caption can say “in orbit” about a clean-room assembly shot, and a thumbnail URL can rot into a 404 without anyone noticing. So the human eye is the gate, dated receipts are kept for every image, and weak metadata gets rejected rather than papered over. When a card's subject asks for a correction, the card gets corrected - publicly, with their words on it.
Where the data comes from
NASA's public APIs (the Astronomy Picture of the Day, the NASA Image and Video Library, and the NeoWs near-Earth object feed), Wikimedia Commons files under their stated licences, and primary documents named in each card's source list. Nothing here is machine-generated, and nothing is behind a paywall: open science works on both sides.
The Application
The same card library runs as a Discord application - a slash-command program you add to a server. Card replies are ephemeral: you can page through the whole collection without posting anything to anyone's feed, then press “Share to channel” on the one card worth seeing. Commands, exactly as registered right now - this table is generated from the application's own command registry at page load, so it cannot go out of date:
The card library
Run one and every card in that family is listed - pick one. By-name lookup is /find.
/spacecraft | Fact cards on 70 years of space flight - rockets, rovers, telescopes, stations and more. |
/science | The math and physics behind what we know: orbits, relativity, tides, measuring the Earth. |
/debunk | Debunk a common flat-earth claim with real data, photos and citations. |
/experiment | Test it yourself: cheap experiments that show the Earth is a spinning sphere. |
/case | Case studies: real-world tests of flat-earth claims - prediction, test, result, reaction. |
/notables | Notable people behind the science - who they are and why they matter. |
/challenge | MCToon's $10,000 challenges to flat-earthers - published parameters, escrowed prize, live status. |
Live from NASA
No canned content - these ask NASA's public APIs at the moment you run them.
/apod | Show today's NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day, any date since 1995, or random picks. |
/photo | Show real astronomy photography from the NASA Image and Video Library. |
/near-earth | List upcoming near-Earth object flybys (NASA NeoWs). |
/asteroid | Look up a near-Earth object by its SPK-ID (the ids /near-earth shows). |
Finding things
/find | Search all card families by name or topic - typos are OK. |
Curated paths
Guided reading orders - the collection's argument, step by step. Same content as the site's /paths pages.
/path | Curated reading paths - the collection in an order that builds an argument. |
For server admins
/setup apod and /setup card-week choose the channels that receive the daily picture and the weekly card. No server data leaves.
/setup | Server configuration (admin only). |
More
/about | What this is, and how to report a problem. |
/help | Show what I can do. |
To run it on your own server: add the application (a server
admin does it - it needs “Integrations” permission for the commands to appear),
then /setup points the daily astronomy picture at a channel of
your choosing. No message content is stored; servers keep their own
settings.