From Slackerpedia Galactica

Organization that has world domination as its number One Priority.
Its number Two Priority is to build a huge time machine.

But when applying simple logic...
We can conclude that they never achieved number Two for the simple reason that is if they had they could just go back and save their past self the effort and make sure they got rich earlier in life.

History

The Slacker Astronomy podcast begin at Boston's Logan International Airport on December 22, 2004. Aaron was reading a newspaper and ran across an article about Godcasting, podcasts which are religious in content. During the flight he came up with the idea for an astronomy podcast. He invited Pamela Gay and Travis Searle to join. As a stutterer, Aaron stayed mostly off the air while Pamela and Travis provided the vocal talent. Aaron wrote 80% of the SA episodes while Pamela wrote the rest.

A few weeks later, the Slacker Astronomy name just came to Aaron one night while brushing his teeth. Perhaps subconsciously it was because he is a fan of filmmaker Richard Linklater, he of the movie Slacker fame. Originally planned as a temporary name, it just stuck.

The first episode aired on February 14, 2005. It was the first of a series of testing shows, given negative episode numbers. The slackers agreed that the goal of the show was simply "to have fun" and that they would do nothing to compromise that aspect. In other words, quality and quantity were back seat to personal enjoyment.

On February 20, 2005 Adam Curry played segments of Slacker Astronomy on his show, The Daily Source Code. At the time DSC was the most popular podcast. It is unclear how he heard about SA, but it is suspected he saw it listed in the Open Podcast Feed, to which Aaron had submitted the first two shows. The glowing review caused a crash of the SA servers for about 6 hours. In the end, SA went from 140 to 2,000 subscribers in about a week. This created the critical mass that allowed SA to grow via word of mouth.

• In May, 2005 SA peaked at #4 in the Podcast Alley top 10 list (as voted by subscribers).
• In August, 2005 iTunes listed SA on its home page as a recommended podcast. Since then SA has been routinely featured by some kind soul at Apple in the iTunes recommended Science podcast categories.
• SA peaked at #28 in iTunes top 100 of all podcasts in October, 2005.
• SA peaked at #4 in the top 10 Science & Medicine podcasts in iTunes Store in January, 2006. It remained in the top 10 for most of the year.
• SA subscriber base peaked at 15,000 weekly unique listeners in March of 2006.
• The most downloaded show was Dirty Rotten Snow Balls with 28,241 downloads (as of 060919).

A paper was published in the referee'd journal Astronomy Education Review detailing the history of SA along with a brief, informal assessment of its astronomical outreach impact.

Rebekah guest hosted a few shows in the summer of 2006 along with Travis and Pamela.

Aaron began graduate studies for a PhD in Math, Science, Technology and Engineering Education at Tufts University in the summer of 2006. Pamela accepted a job as a visiting professor at Southern Illinois State University at the same time and moved from Boston to Edwardsville, IL.

The Slacker Astronomy podcast ended on September 14, 2006. Pamela created a new podcast called AstronomyCast with Fraser Cain of UniverseToday. Aaron, Travis and Rebekah were joined by Dr. Doug Welch and Michael Koppelman to create a new podcast, Slackerpedia Galactica - which integrates SA style scripted shows into a larger, unscripted format.

Slacker Astronomy continues as a web site blog and video podcast. The first video podcast was posted to YouTube on September 10, 2006 and added to the Slackerpedia Galactica feed on September 19.