Ancient Web: The Nine Planets Froze the Solar System in 1996

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A solar-system encyclopedia last updated in 1996 tells two histories at once: what astronomers knew then, and what the Web looked like before scientific references began updating themselves.

Visit the 1996 mirror of The Nine Planets.

Software engineer and astronomy enthusiast Bill Arnett created The Nine Planets as a multimedia tour through the Sun, planets, moons, comets, asteroids, and the history of interplanetary exploration. This surviving copy at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki carries copyrights for 1994–1996 and a last-update notice of November 8, 1996.

Its contents are spectacularly exhaustive for a plain HTML directory. Jupiter links to Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, then to groups of smaller satellites. Saturn has its own parade of moons. Farther down are spacecraft, a glossary, planetary discovery chronology, image lists, and essays about the solar system's formation.

A mirrored encyclopedia remembers an older sky

The most obvious time capsule is the title. The page lists Pluto with Charon among nine planets, as astronomers commonly did before the International Astronomical Union's 2006 reclassification. Some moons are still grouped in ways that reflect the knowledge available at the time, and an entry is devoted to 'possible new satellites.' Those are historic descriptions, not today's definitive astronomical reference.

Arnett's mirrored personal homepage describes his background as a software engineer and explains why he allowed many copies of his documents around the Internet. He warned that mirrors could become outdated, but offered a master-copy link so visitors could check for revisions.

The encyclopedia's main page makes the same practical argument for distributed hosting: distant readers might get better response times from a nearer mirror. For a visitor on a slow connection, geography and local copies were not incidental concerns.

This surviving edition also preserves early Web habits: wide-spaced headings, tiny illustrations, sound and movie links, acknowledgments, and a troubleshooting page for browsers that could not display some features.

No contemporary astronomy student should rely on its planetary census without consulting current sources. As a historical artifact, however, it is difficult to improve on an old scientific resource that honestly retains its date.

Explore the original solar-system index and meet its author.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.