Astronaut Sloth

About

Astronaut Sloth, sometimes known as Space Sloth, refers to a photoshopped image of a sloth’s head superimposed on a space suit. The image gained notoriety through sites like Tumblr and Reddit after users began pranking people in real life by replacing their framed photos or desktop wallpapers with Astronaut Sloth.

Origin

Titled “Sloth on the Moon,” the photoshopped image was created by digital artist Pedro Dionísio and uploaded to his deviantArt^[3] account on January 17th, 2012.

Spread

The day after the photo was shared on deviantArt, Dionísio reposted it to his Tumblr^[4], where it earned a modest number of 112 notes. It was reposted to Tumblr by queenofsloths^[1] on February 8th, 2012, where it was far better received with 9,237 notes over the course of ten months. Two days later, it was shared on the /r/Trees subreddit^[5] with the title “Smoking hash out of my friends bong, how I feel at a [9].” The post earned 3,345 upvotes and 1,170 points overall. On February 17th, the photo was featured as part of a caption contest on Cheezburger’s Animal Capshunz^[6] site. Ten days later, a novelty Twitter account for the sloth^[7] was created. Two Facebook fan pages^[8][9] were created in May and June that same year with just over 100 likes between them as of November 2012. The original photo as well as its derivative instances (shown below) can be found on Tumblr under the tags space sloth^[10], astronaut sloth^[11] and astrosloth.^[12]

On October 29th, Tumblr user alpacalypse^[13] made a post stating that her father got mad at her for changing all of his account photos and device backgrounds to the sloth photo. Thirty minutes later, she noted^[14] that his phone was password protected so she placed a framed photo of the sloth on his desk (shown below, left). The following day, a screenshot of her post was shared on Reddit^[15], gaining 27,581 upvotes and 2,045 votes overall. On November 2nd, another Redditor posted a photo^[16] claiming he switched out his boss’ family photos with Astronaut Sloth (shown below, right).

Search Interest

The term "space sloth" picked up search volume prior to the image's first posting due to the single topic Tumblr Sloth in Space^[2], which launched in November 2011. This blog only made ten posts and solely featured images of sloths photoshopped over nebulae.

External References