🌌 NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day Scraper

🚀 Export the entire APOD archive in seconds. Pull NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day catalog of 11,000+ pictures going back to 1995, with HD image links, video thumbnails, official explanations, and credits. No API key, no login, no manual download wrangling.

The NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day Scraper pulls from the official NASA APOD source and returns 13 fields per record, including title, date, full explanation, standard and HD image URLs, video thumbnails, copyright credit, and a permalink to the original NASA page. APOD is one of the longest-running daily science publications on the internet and has been edited by professional astronomers Dr. Robert Nemiroff and Dr. Jerry Bonnell since 1995.

The archive covers every day from 1995-06-16 to today, one curated image or video per day, with concise expert-written context for each. This Actor exports a single date, a custom range, a random sample, or the latest entry as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML. All filters run server-side, so you skip the date arithmetic and the HTML scraping entirely.

📋 What the NASA APOD Scraper does

Four selection workflows in a single run:

• 🌟 Latest. Today's picture, single record.
• 📅 Single date. Pull any specific day from 1995-06-16 onward.
• 📆 Date range. Bulk-export between any two dates (week, month, year, decade).
• 🎲 Random sample. Pull 1-100 random pictures across the entire archive.

Each record carries the full astronomer-written explanation, both the standard and HD image URLs (or the video URL plus thumbnail when the day's pick is a video), copyright credit, and a permalink to the original NASA page.

💡 Why it matters: APOD is the gold standard of daily science communication. Building your own pipeline means parsing dated HTML pages, handling video days, and chasing HD URLs. This Actor does it once, cleanly, in seconds.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: copyright, date, explanation, hdUrl, imageUrl, mediaType, permalink, scrapedAt, sourceUrl, thumbnailUrl, title, videoUrl. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Pick a mode (latest, date, range, random), fill in any date bounds, and set maxItems.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more reference-data scrapers.

⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by NASA, the APOD editors, or any of its content contributors. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available open astronomy content is collected and credit lines are preserved on every record.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

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