In this post, I will talk about a free API to get astronomy picture of the day from NASA. Here using this API, you can get today’s astronomical picture of day by just making a simple API call. This is an official API from NASA which you can use to fetch APOD and use it in your web and mobile applications. Just like other APIs, it returns data in JSON format and you can also see some information about the image in various JSON keys. You can see URL to the image, its description, its title, and some others information. You can get this data in JSON and then do whatever you like.
If you want to embed the images in the webpage of your website then you can do that. You can make calls from different programming languages and get the data. You will even find the different code snippet examples on its homepage that you can use. Otherwise, you can use this API using your browser and the command line. Or, you can run cron job or something like that to daily download the astronomy picture of the day automatically.
Free API to Get Astronomy Picture of the Day from Nasa:
To get the astronomy picture of the day, you have to generate the API key first. Go to this page of NASA and then you sign up to get the API key. You can copy down the API key and then start using that. On the same page, you will see some code snippets in JavaScript and some other languages that you can use.
Now, simply make the API call. You can use the browser or use cURL from the command line. It will get you the response in JSON format You can see the following screenshot. And along with direct URL of the image, you can see some additional data in the API response.
Above, you can see how this API works to get you the astronomy picture of the data from NASA. This is the official API from NASA for developers and individual programmers. You can easily use this API for any purpose and integrate in your projects or any other programming related work.
Final thoughts
NASA’s API for astronomy picture of the day is a very simple and useful API that you will like. From your web and mobile applications, you can easily fetch the high-resolution astronomy picture along with other details. If you want to convert the JSON data that it returns to some other format then you can do that. There are some tools which allow you to convert the JSON data to CSV, XML, and some other popular formats.
