🪐 NASA JPL Horizons Ephemeris Scraper

🚀 Pull observer ephemerides and physical data in seconds. Get right ascension, declination, apparent magnitude, range, elongation, plus mean radius, mass, density, and rotation period for any solar-system body from NASA JPL Horizons.

Turn NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Horizons system into clean, structured records you can drop into an observation planner, an orbital-mechanics study, a planetarium app, or a research notebook. Pick a body, an observing center, a time span, and a step size, and the Actor returns one row per epoch with the apparent sky position and the body's physical parameters attached to every row.

Coverage is the full Horizons catalog: the Sun, the eight planets, the Moon, Pluto, and any object addressable by a Horizons COMMAND id, including numbered asteroids (for example 433 Eros), comets (for example 1P Halley), and spacecraft (for example -125544 for the ISS). Observer geometry can be computed from Earth's center, the solar-system barycenter, the Sun, the Moon, or Mars.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Amateur and professional astronomers	Plan observations with RA/Dec and magnitude
Orbital and planetary researchers	Pull range, elongation, and physical constants
Planetarium and app developers	Seed a sky engine without a Horizons client
Educators and science communicators	Build clear datasets for teaching

📋 What the NASA JPL Horizons Ephemeris Scraper does

This Actor calls the public NASA JPL Horizons API in OBSERVER mode and returns one clean record per ephemeris step:

• Sky position — right ascension and declination in the ICRF frame.
• Brightness and geometry — apparent magnitude, surface brightness, range in astronomical units, range rate, solar elongation with its leading/trailing code, and the Sun-target-observer angle.
• Physical data — mean and equatorial radius, mass, density, GM, sidereal rotation and orbit periods, obliquity, geometric albedo, mean temperature, and escape speed, parsed from the body's Horizons header and attached to every row.

The NASA logo is used as the record image. Every record carries a scrapedAt timestamp.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: apparentMagnitude, bodyName, dateUtc, decIcrf, deltaAu, imageUrl, meanRadiusKm, raIcrf, results, scrapedAt, solarElongationDeg. 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. Create a free Apify account using this sign-up link.
2. Open the NASA JPL Horizons Ephemeris Scraper.
3. Choose a body (or custom plus a customBody id) and an observing center.
4. Set startTime, stopTime, stepSize, and maxItems.
5. Click Start and grab your results when the run finishes.

🔗 Recommended Actors

• USNO Astronomical Almanac Scraper
• NOAA CoastWatch ERDDAP Ocean Data Scraper
• More science and reference data Actors in the ParseForge collection

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection.

⚠️ Disclaimer: independent tool, not affiliated with NASA or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Only publicly available data is collected.

🆘 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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