fetch the astronomy picture of the day via the nasa apod api
domain: api.nasa.gov · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Obtain a free api.nasa.gov API key (or use DEMO_KEY for low-volume testing).
Call GET https://api.nasa.gov/planetary/apod?api_key=KEY for today's entry, or add date=YYYY-MM-DD for a specific day.
Use start_date/end_date to retrieve a range as a JSON array, or count=N (max 100) for N random past entries — date, count, and start_date/end_date are mutually exclusive.
Set thumbs=True to also get a thumbnail URL when the day's APOD is a video rather than an image.
Read the returned JSON fields (title, explanation, url/hdurl, media_type, date, copyright).
Known gotchas
DEMO_KEY is shared and heavily rate-limited; register a personal key for anything beyond quick testing.
media_type can be 'video', in which case url points to a video embed rather than an image — check media_type before assuming an image URL.
count cannot be combined with date or start_date/end_date; combining them returns an error.
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