Long before every bad claim generated twelve reaction videos and a monetized correction thread, Phil Plait was already writing web pages explaining why the astronomy was wrong.
Bad Astronomy grew around a simple idea: astronomy is popular enough that movies, television, newspapers, conspiracy theorists, and ordinary people constantly get pieces of it wrong.
Plait began publishing science explanations online in the 1990s and built the site into a large collection of misconceptions, media criticism, and responses to fringe claims.
The surviving pages are wonderfully specific.
The web needed somebody to answer back
One section dismantles the 2001 Fox television special claiming the Apollo Moon landings were faked. Plait goes through familiar arguments about missing stars, shadows, the waving flag, radiation, photographs, and supposed studio sets instead of merely calling the program ridiculous and moving on.
Other pages tackle the “Face on Mars,” Richard Hoagland’s claims, Planet X, UFO material, bad science in television, and broader questions about how scientists should respond to pseudoscience.
That last category makes the archive more interesting than a pile of corrections.
A 2004 essay on debating pseudoscientists wrestles with a problem that feels completely current: correcting nonsense can spread it, ignoring nonsense can let it grow, and people committed to a claim can simply move to the next argument after the previous one fails.
The design is old, the navigation is hand-built, and many pages still carry update notes from the era when a webmaster openly documented corrections instead of silently replacing text.
That makes Bad Astronomy useful as web history as well as science writing.
It captures an early moment when subject-matter experts were discovering that the open web had created both a misinformation machine and the cheapest rebuttal machine ever built.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains plenty of sites where one knowledgeable person simply decided the Internet needed a better answer.
Bad Astronomy is one of the clearest examples.