To find and view past APODs, tap here:
t.me/apodQA/3
NASA's APOD presence in Telegram:
🌐apod.nasa.gov
Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
Created
Between 1 April 2023 and 31 October 2023 — estimated from Telegram’s id allocation, not measured. How this range is calculated.
Science — a classification, not a measurement. An on-box language model (Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-FP8, prompt version 1) read this channel’s own recent posts on 9 September 2026 and assigned it the closest of 31 fixed categories, at 100% confidence. This is a model’s judgement about what the channel is likely to be about, not a fact this register measured the way a subscriber count or a view count is measured — it can be revised on a later pass, and it carries no weight anywhere else on this page. How this classification works, and why it has no browse page of its own yet.
Growth
29 measurements spanning 33 days, net +220. Dots are measurements; the straight line between them is drawn to join them, not to claim we know the path taken in between — snapshots are recorded only when a count changes, so gaps mean “no change observed”, never “interpolated”. The vertical axis spans 34,815–35,142 and does not start at zero.
Measurement log — every subscribers count we have recorded, most recent 20 of 29
Measured (UTC)
Subscribers
Change
8 Sept 2026, 12:02
35,073
-31
5 Sept 2026, 04:18
35,104
+1
3 Sept 2026, 12:18
35,103
+10
2 Sept 2026, 04:34
35,093
+4
1 Sept 2026, 07:27
35,089
+4
31 Aug 2026, 05:37
35,085
+12
30 Aug 2026, 04:47
35,073
+6
29 Aug 2026, 07:16
35,067
+14
28 Aug 2026, 07:04
35,053
+16
27 Aug 2026, 07:04
35,037
-5
26 Aug 2026, 03:43
35,042
+1
25 Aug 2026, 03:53
35,041
-19
23 Aug 2026, 19:44
35,060
-5
22 Aug 2026, 06:05
35,065
+9
20 Aug 2026, 21:44
35,056
+15
19 Aug 2026, 21:12
35,041
+1
18 Aug 2026, 20:15
35,040
+14
17 Aug 2026, 19:56
35,026
-4
16 Aug 2026, 16:56
35,030
+13
14 Aug 2026, 22:36
35,017
first reading
Engagement
96 posts held, back to 27 July 2026 — the reader has not yet reached the start of this channel’s public history, so older posts may sit further back, unread. Read across 70 pages of Telegram’s post history, 20 posts per page.
ERR · 30 days
14.2%
avg views ÷ 35,073 subscribers
Avg views / post
4,990
67 posts measured
Reaction rate
1.29%
reactions ÷ views · ER floor
Posts in window
67
of 96 held
ERR is average views per post over the last 30 days divided by subscribers, the definition TGStat uses, so this figure is comparable with the one you will see elsewhere. It falls structurally as a channel grows: a high ERR on a small channel and a low one on a large channel describe reach mathematics, not quality. We publish the figure and the sample it came from and pass no verdict on it.
ER is defined industry-wide as (forwards + reactions + comments) ÷ views — note the denominator is views, not subscribers. Telegram’s public web preview carries views and reactions but not forward or comment counts, so the reaction rate above is the reactions term only and is therefore a floor: the true ER for this channel is higher by an amount we have not measured and will not estimate.
What these figures were computed from
Window
Rolling 30 days · latest post in window 9 September 2026
Posts held
96 (27 July 2026 – 9 September 2026)
Views total
334,210
Reactions total
4,327
Forwards / comments
not exposed by the public surface — not measured, not estimated
Readings taken
9 Sept 2026, 12:09 UTC
Views are a single reading per post, taken at the time above. A post published in the last day or two is still accumulating views, which pulls the 30-day average down slightly. That is a property of the standard definition rather than a fault in it, so we keep the definition rather than “correcting” the number into something nobody can reproduce.
Precision. Telegram publishes view counts on its public widget in short form — 8.12K, 3.7M — so any reading at or above 1,000 reaches us rounded to three significant figures, and only counts below 1,000 are exact. Averages and rates derived from them are shown to the same precision rather than to the unit: a figure like 3,701,250 would assert digits nobody measured.
Reaction counts are published per emoji and rounded the same way, so a total below 1,000 is exact and a larger one is a sum that may carry a rounded component from each emoji above 1,000. Because it is a sum, it does not look rounded — read a large reaction total as three significant figures per contributing emoji rather than as the figure it prints.
What this channel posts
Photos
≈11,100
Videos
≈409
Links
≈11,500
Lifetime counters from Telegram’s own channel header, read 9 September 2026 — not the date at the top of this page, which is when the subscriber count was last read. A count marked ≈ was rounded by Telegram before we ever saw it — t.me prints these counters in full below 1,000 and to three significant figures above, so ≈142,000 means somewhere between 141,500 and 142,499.
Video runtime
5m 02s
Average length
1m 00s
Measured directly from 5 videos with a duration reading, out of the posts we hold for this channel — not this channel’s whole posting history, only the sample this register has actually read. An exact reading to the second, taken from the post itself rather than from Telegram’s own rounded chrome, so it carries no ≈ mark.
Reaction mix
6,097 reactions across 93 posts, in 10 distinct kinds. The most used accounts for 62.4% of them.
Every reaction kind recorded on the sample, most used first
Reaction
Count
Share
Share, drawn
❤
3,804
62.4%
🔥
676
11.1%
🤩
585
9.59%
👾
420
6.89%
👍
304
4.99%
🤔
149
2.44%
🤯
70
1.15%
😱
51
0.836%
😁
34
0.558%
👎
4
0.066%
No sentiment is inferred, and none should be read in. This table is ordered by count and by nothing else. Emoji do not carry stable meaning across languages or communities — 🙏 is thanks in one channel and mourning in another — so we publish which ones were pressed and how often, and pass no judgement on what an audience meant by them.
Precision. Telegram publishes reaction counts per emoji and short-forms each one — 4.34K, 1.2M — so any single kind at or above 1,000 reaches us at three significant figures, and only counts below 1,000 are exact. The shares above are ratios of those figures and carry the same error. This is also why the total here can differ slightly from a reaction total printed elsewhere on the page: both are sums of the same rounded parts, taken over samples with different edges.
Coverage. Reactions were read on 96 of the 96 sampled posts in this sample. Summed by Telegram’s own count on each post — not by adding up the per-emoji breakdown above — those same posts carry 6,346 reactions in total: the kind of figure the paragraph above means by “a reaction total printed elsewhere on the page”.
Measured over the 96 most recent posts we hold, published 27 July 2026 to 9 September 2026, using the newest reading held for each. Telegram Stars are excluded: they are a payment, not a reaction, and they have their own section.
2026 September 9
Witness XZ Andromedae Wink
Video Credit: Ogetay Kayali (MTU, Starfront Observatories)
Text: Keighley Rockcliffe (NASA GSFC, UMBC CSST, CRESST II)
Is this star winking at us? The central object in today’s animation is not one but two stars. XZ Andromedae, indicated by the bold lines, is an Algol-type eclipsing binary with a nearly edge-on orbit from Earth’s perspective. The bottom light curve shows …
2026 September 8
Hubble: Decagon Around Saturn's South Pole
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, HST; A. Sánchez-Lavega (UPV), A. Simon (NASA-GSFC), M. Wong (UC Berkeley); Processing: A. Pagan (STScI)
Why are Saturn’s poles geometric? Saturn’s North Pole has been known to be surrounded by a hexagonal (6 sides) cloud since discovery in 1987 in data taken by NASA’s Voyager spacecrafts, which quickly flew past the ringed w…
2026 September 7
The Pelican Nebula in Gas, Dust, and Stars
Image Credit & Copyright: Mark Killion
The Pelican Nebula is slowly being transformed. IC 5070 (an official designation) is divided from the larger North America Nebula by a molecular cloud filled with dark dust. The deep featured picture from Utah, USA incorporates 25 hours of exposure and brings out great details of this filamentary dust. The Pelican Neb…
2026 September 6
Pluto in Enhanced Color
Image Credit: NASA, Johns Hopkins Univ./APL, Southwest Research Inst.
Pluto is more colorful than we can see. Color data and high-resolution images of our Solar System's most famous dwarf planet, taken by the robotic New Horizons spacecraft during its flyby in 2015 July, have been digitally combined to give an enhanced-color view of this ancient world sporting an unexpectedl…
2026 September 5
Chasing the Moon's Shadow
Image Credit: NASA
Chasing the shadow of a New Moon, NASA’s WB-57F high altitude research aircraft took to the skies off the coast of Iceland on August 12 to observe a total solar eclipse. At 50,000 feet the aircraft was piloted along the precisely determined path of totality to maximize its time in the Moon’s shadow. A suite of high-resolution cameras on board was able to…
2026 September 4
Nā ʻUhane Māhoe Huki Pū i ke Ola
Image Credit: International Gemini Observatory / NOIRLab/NSF/AURA
Image Processing: J. Miller & M. Rodriguez (International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab),
T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), D. de Martin & M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab)
Nā ʻUhane Māhoe Huki Pū i ke Ola, is the Hawaiian name given to this image of a pair of spiral galaxies locked in …
Showing the 12 most recent of 96 posts we hold for @apod_telegram. View and reaction counts are the latest single reading for each post, not a live figure, and a recent post is still accumulating both. A view count marked ≈ was rounded by Telegram before we ever saw it — t.me prints views in full below 1,000 and to three significant figures above, so ≈1,200,000 means somewhere between 1,150,000 and 1,249,999. Unmarked counts are exact. Text is reproduced from the public post preview and truncated for length.
Posts edited after publishing
@apod_telegram edited 4 posts after it first published — the same permalink now carries different wording than the one this register originally read, caught because our own crawl held a copy of the earlier text.
An edit is not deception. Typo fixes, price updates and corrections look exactly like this too — this register can tell you the wording changed and when, not why. How this is measured.
First edit seen
11 August 2026
Most recent edit
25 August 2026
Polls
The 6 most recent of 14 polls we hold for this entry, as Telegram rendered them when we read the post. A poll’s figures keep moving after that, so each one is dated.
Which moon appears near the end of Cassini's approach to Saturn?
Titan42%
Mimas16%
Enceladus27%
Rhea14%
Shares as published, totalling 99%. No per-option vote count is published by Telegram, so none is shown.
Percentages only — there are no per-option vote counts here, because Telegram publishes none. The public post preview gives each option’s share and a single voter total, and nothing else. Multiplying one by the other would produce a per-option tally that looks measured and is not: the shares are rounded to whole numbers before we ever see them. We print what was published and leave the column that does not exist empty.
The shares need not add up to 100. Rounding alone puts many polls at 99 or 101. A poll that allows more than one answer per voter runs well past 100 by design, and several here do. The bars are drawn against a fixed 100% track at each option’s own percentage rather than normalised to the total, so a poll that exceeds it shows that it does instead of being quietly rescaled.
Read from the 96 most recent posts we hold, published 27 July 2026 to 9 September 2026. Telegram labels each poll by kind — an anonymous poll, a quiz, a closed set of final results — and that label is reproduced rather than paraphrased.
Forward network
Republished by
Channels on the register that have forwarded this channel's posts into their own feed.
Built only from forwarded posts we have actually read, on both sides. Coverage is early and deliberately incomplete: a missing link means we have not read the post that would prove it, never that the relationship does not exist. Counts are distinct forwarded posts observed, so they only ever go up as we read more.
Mentions
Named by 7 registered channels — every channel on the register whose own posts have named this one, by its current username or any other username it currently holds, merged from two separately captured readings of the same fact so a namer caught by only one of them is not missed and a namer both caught is not counted twice. A username this channel has since dropped is not matched — that handle may belong to someone else now, and crediting today’s namer to yesterday’s owner would misattribute it.
Named by
Channels on the register whose posts name this channel's handle.
A mention is a weaker signal than a forward and is counted separately for that reason — naming a channel is not republishing it, and a handle in a post body is easy to place deliberately. The post counts beside each row below are distinct posts in which the handle appeared, from posts we have read on both sides — the “Named by N registered channels” figure above is a different count, of distinct NAMING CHANNELS rather than posts, and is not the sum of the rows under it.
Channels Telegram recommends alongside this one
Telegram’s own answer, not this register’s. When this register asks Telegram’s API what is similar to this channel, this is the list it returns, in the exact order Telegram returns it — never re-sorted by subscribers or by anything else this register measures. The relationship, and the order, are Telegram’s; we record them and date them, and make no claim of our own about which of these channels actually resemble this one.
Read from Telegram’s recommendation API, most recently 2 September 2026. Telegram holds a list like this for a small and growing share of the register — how this is measured, and why most channel pages show nothing here.
Appears in Telegram’s recommendations for other channels
The reverse of the list above, and a different kind of signal. This does not require this channel to have ever been asked about directly — each row below is a channel we DID ask Telegram about, whose Telegram-generated list happened to include this one. A channel can appear here with an empty list above it, because being named by someone else’s query is independent of having been queried itself.
Physics @physics · 33,276 Telegram ranks this channel #7 of 79 here — alongside 78 others — read 4 September 2026
NASA | Физика | Астрономия @kosmos149 · 88,466 Telegram ranks this channel #39 of 65 here — alongside 64 others — read 17 August 2026
Science in telegram @science · 120,435 Telegram ranks this channel #41 of 92 here — alongside 91 others — read 14 August 2026
This channel appears in 3 seed channels' Telegram-generated recommendation lists in total. Each is Telegram’s list for THAT channel, not this one — see how this is measured.
Cite this entry
A live page changes as we take new readings, so a citation should name the measurement it is based on, not just the URL. The line below cites the subscriber count as measured 8 September 2026 — this
entry's latest reading, not the date you are reading this.
“NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day” (@apod_telegram), 35,073 subscribers as measured 8 September 2026. Telegram Register, tgregister.com/channel/apod_telegram.
Full measurement history, CC BY 4.0. Every reading this register holds for this entry, not just the latest one, as a dated, downloadable record: CSV · JSON. Free to use with attribution to tgregister.com. Each file carries its own generation timestamp, which is the figure to cite for exactly when the data was retrieved.