NASA Broke APOD So I Fixed It

Astronomy Picture of the Day is one of those great old websites that has been around for decades. The site features stunning new pictures or videos on a daily basis. 

Many years ago I installed a simple application that downloaded the latest APOD photo and made it my Desktop background on Windows. This little application worked great and provided me with a beautiful Desktop background on a daily basis. Recently I noticed the backdrop wasn't updating so I did some research. NASA apparently decided to change the APOD website, breaking their own APIs that interact with the site.

NASA changed the URL for APOD from apod.nasa.gov to science.nasa.gov/apod, breaking any apps that were using the original URL. They also completely changed the page layout, further breaking any apps that may have been scraping the picture of the day. NASA’s API hasn’t been updated to support these changes so if you call it they simply return the NASA logo, not the picture of the day. Older apps trying to use the original URL or API to download the picture of the day will fail (my old app failed silently). 

I fixed this problem with some simple Powerscript (this only works on Windows, obviously). 

You can download the script here.  Make sure you follow the instructions for unblocking and scheduling the script to run on a daily basis.

I hope someone finds this helpful.

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