I created a Python tool to download NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day images
APOD, or NASA's Astronomy Picture Of the Day, turns 30 today. In celebration a mosaic of photographs from the last 5 years that recreate the well-known evocative picture of the starry sky was made.
NASA made a website that shows what space looked like on your birthday ๐
Other websites like NASA photo of the day
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I wanted to share a tool I built that lets you easily download images from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) website. If you're like me and love collecting these incredible astronomy images, this might be useful to you!
What it does:
Download images for any specific date since APOD started in 1995
Grab images in bulk for any date range (like an entire month or year)
Download the most recent images with a single command
Find random images from the archive for astronomy inspiration
Save all the image metadata too (title, explanation, copyright info)
Example commands:
# Get today's APOD image python apod_downloader.py # Download images from January 2025 python apod_downloader.py --start-date 2025-01-01 --end-date 2025-04-26 # Get the last 30 days of images python apod_downloader.py --last-days 30 # Download a random APOD image python apod_downloader.py --random
The code is available on GitHub: AhmedOsamaMath/nasa-apod-downloader
I hope some of you find this useful for your astronomy image collections! Let me know if you have any suggestions or feature requests.