AstronomyPictureOfTheDay

Astronomy Picture of the Day downloader

This application downloads the latest image from the Astronomy Picture of the Day site and sets it as your desktop background. It saves old copies of the images in a folder within ~/Pictures to be used as screen saver images. When it is done, it opens the APOD page in Safari so you can read the description of the picture.

The inspiration for this script came from an article by Andy Ihnatko.

Installation

  1. Unpack the ZIP file.
  2. Copy AstronomyPictureOfTheDay to your Applications folder.
  3. Run the application.

To schedule the job to run daily, use iCal to schedule an event to run daily and open the application.

You will want to periodically clean out the screensaver pictures folder.

Version 3.1

Released: Thu Feb 7 08:10:18 2008
Release Details

Download

Download version 3.1

Related Links

AstronomyPictureOfTheDay 3.0 (2008-02-06)
I finally fixed one of the lingering "issues" I've had since migrating from Tiger to Leopard last month. Something in the Automator actions or other behavior changed in my AstronomyPictureOfTheDay app and every morning I have been greeted with 2 Safari windows. One is the usual window showing the description of the image downloaded that night, and the other is the local copy of the image. I don't need to see the latter, and it seemed a little sloppy so I wanted to fix it. ...
AstronomyPictureOfTheDay 2.0 (2007-09-03)
There is a new release of AstronomyPictureOfTheDay available this morning. Version 2.0 is a substantial rewrite of the 1.1 version, but retains essentially the same functionality. The primary difference is that you no longer have to run a script to "personalize" it during installation. Now that it is distributed as an Application instead of an Automator workflow, you can just drag it to your Applications folder.

The source is still created with Automator, but some of the Finder actions for working with directories have been replaced by Shell Script actions to perform the same operations. The Finder actions are hard-coded to specific folder names, selected in the Automator UI when the action is configured. With a Shell Script action, I can use environment variables such as "$HOME" to make the action more flexible. Using variables also avoids the problem of having everything in the workflow tied to my own home directory, so that the paths needed to be modified before the workflow was usable by anyone else.

I could, of course, have written the entire program as a shell script, Python program, or whatever. But the point of building it with Automator in the first place was that it was easy. I suppose I am stretching the boundaries of where Automator is the easiest tool for this particular job, but at least now the hack is hidden inside the app instead of hanging out where everyone can see it in the installation instructions.
Astronomy Picture of the Day (2007-09-03)
I have been using an Automator workflow inspired by an article by Andy Ihnatko to download the latest image from the Astronomy Picture of the Day site and set it as my desktop background. It also adds a copy to my screen saver images folder. Some of the pictures are pretty, and some are inspiring.

Check it out, if you are interested.