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.