extrasolar-planets.com

Our site went online on August 13, 2001 and has undergone several redesigns since then. After being finalists for the Grimme Online Award in 2005, our site gained wider recognition and has often been honored in television reports and radio programs.

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Television

 

For example in the WDR broadcast from 24.01.2005 - “Impressive images from space, the latest news about the biggest expeditions and lots of background information: This website is one of the best.”

 

Radio

 

For example on WDR 2 - broadcast on April 21, 2005 - “Stargazing on the Internet: Stars, moons, planets - thanks to the images that satellites send us from space, more and more people are becoming enthusiastic about astronomy and space travel. If you want comprehensive and detailed information, you should take a look at the extrasolar-planets.com website. It is a kind of universal encyclopedia for space fans. The articles on this site are comprehensible and serious across the board and are supplemented with pictures and videos - you really can browse for hours. The WDR 2 favorite.”

 

For many years in a row since 2005, our site has also been listed in the German web address book as one of the “best websites in the field of science”.

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Wikipedia

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Wikipedia is a great idea and you can find many good articles on science there. But unfortunately there are also many topics that are treated less seriously, as we experienced firsthand. In May 2006, we reported in a news item: “Former Nazi removed from Space Hall of Fame”. This concerned the removal of Professor Hubertus Strughold from the Space Hall of Fame in Arizona due to his alleged involvement in horrific human experiments. But for a long time you couldn't read anything about this in the German-language Wikipedia. Certain people kept removing all information about Professor Hubertus Strughold's dark past. A so-called “edit war” was raging. This opened our eyes a little and showed us that our work is important, even in the age of Wikipedia. Because, at least in the German version, the quality of the evidence and arguments is not important.

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Legal dispute

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A dark chapter was the legal dispute with the largest European aerospace company EADS/Astrium (now Airbus Defense and Space), which claimed that our use of the 'Astris' trademark infringed on their 'Astrium' trademark rights. As if many terms in ASTRonomics and ASTRophysics did not begin with “Astr”. After an extremely expensive legal battle, we ultimately lost our trademark rights, but not our domain www.astris.de. However, as there was a permanent risk of a temporary injunction during the legal dispute, we left our domain astris.de dormant and were only accessible under the domain www.extrasolar-planets.com.

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The arrogance of Google Germany

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For a long time, we wrote news on a regular basis, but in the end we had to stop because Google removed us from the Google News Index in December 2006 and the effort and return were no longer in proportion. Google was bothered by the fact that we always included the sources from NASA and ESA in our news. They labeled us merely as a news aggregator. Our news were not just simple translations from English, but were expanded with research and background information and often provided more depth than the typical news agency reports. But Google Germany's arrogance was difficult to deal with. After some discussions, we were assured that we would be reinstated and that “the inclusion process would only take a few weeks”, but we have not appeared in the Google News Index since. Google employees presume to decide for themselves what is good or bad science news and are as tolerant as a Spanish inquisitor. 

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Partnerships

 

For a long time, we operated a news partnership with other German-language space sites, including Raumfahrer.net. We also ran the Space Forum together with other astronomy sites (including the former site of René Grodde, who now runs Atri.eu).

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Blog

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From April 2007 - January 2009 I also ran an astronomy blog. I was annoyed by conspiracy theories about the moon landing, the lack of detailed knowledge (“quickly dubbed super-Earth”) or even the fake news in the tabloid press (“Mars is no longer cooling us”). I also had doubts about the future of humanity when someone on the TV show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” didn't know what orbited the Earth (the sun or the moon). I particularly remember the French edition of the show, when even in the audience joker 56% thought it was the sun.

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Content Management System

 

For the first seven years, I used self-developed websites created with Adobe GoLive software. In November 2008 the American content management system (CMS) Vivvo was introduced. This had advantages and disadvantages. Unfortunately, it also made us susceptible to hacking.

 

Since 2019, our website has been running on the Israeli cloud platform Wix.com. Our current version went online on 22.03.2019. Furthermore, as the legal requirements (data protection, etc.) for operating a website are becoming increasingly complicated, we merged our astronomy website with the archaeology website www.ancient-cultures.com.