apodc
Download NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (user)
When & Why to Use This Skill
The APOD Downloader is a specialized Claude skill that automates the retrieval of NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day. It streamlines the process of fetching high-resolution cosmic imagery and its accompanying scientific metadata directly from NASA's official servers, saving them locally for easy access, archival, or educational use.
Use Cases
- Daily Space Archiving: Automatically download and organize NASA's daily astronomical photos and descriptions into a structured local library for personal or professional collections.
- Educational Resource Gathering: Quickly fetch high-quality visual aids and factual scientific data for astronomy lessons, classroom presentations, or science-themed content creation.
- Creative Inspiration & Wallpapers: Effortlessly obtain the latest high-resolution space photography to use as design references or high-quality desktop backgrounds without manual searching.
| name | apodc |
|---|---|
| description | Download NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (user) |
| user_invocable | true |
APOD - Astronomy Picture of the Day Downloader
Overview
This skill downloads the latest Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) from NASA's website and saves it to your Desktop along with metadata.
Instructions
When the user requests to download APOD or get today's astronomy picture:
Run the download script:
python3 ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/apod/download_apod.pyThe script will:
- Fetch the latest APOD from https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
- Download the high-resolution image
- Save it to
~/Desktop/APOD/APOD_YYYY-MM-DD.{ext} - Create a metadata file
~/Desktop/APOD/APOD_YYYY-MM-DD.txtwith title, description, and date
Report the result to the user, including:
- Success/failure status
- File paths where the image and metadata were saved
- Any errors encountered
Requirements
The following Python packages must be installed:
pip install requests beautifulsoup4
Special Cases
- Videos: If APOD is a video (YouTube embed), the script will notify the user and skip the download
- Network errors: Clear error messages will be displayed if the website is unreachable
- Existing files: If today's APOD has already been downloaded, it will be overwritten
Examples
User request: "Download today's APOD" Action: Run the script and report that the image was saved to ~/Desktop/APOD/APOD_2025-12-19.png
User request: "Get the astronomy picture of the day" Action: Run the script and confirm the download with file locations
User request: "Fetch NASA's picture of the day" Action: Run the script and show the image title and save location