Get NASA "Astronomy Picture of the Day"

apod.py

# Get "Astronomy Picture of the Day" automatically from https://apod.nasa.gov/
# Saved file is today-date(YYYY-MM-DD) + filename (example: 2020-04-28_Kepler90Illustration_Kepler_1080.jpg)
# Requires:
# - lxml
# - requests
# - beautifulsoup4

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from datetime import date

url = 'https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/'
response = requests.get(url)

s = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'lxml')

# <a href="image/2005/Message_Arecibo_2000.jpg">
#   <IMG SRC="image/2005/Message_Arecibo_960.jpg"
#   alt="See Explanation.  Clicking on the picture will download the highest resolution version available." style="max-width:100%"></a>

# find <img ...>
imgRoot = s.find('img')

# take the parent
print(imgRoot.parent)

# get img link target (a href) not the one displayed in img src

src = imgRoot.parent.get('href')

img_url = url + src
print(img_url)

print(date.today())
filename = date.today().strftime('%Y-%m-%d') + '_' + src.split('/')[-1]

print(filename)
img_response = requests.get(img_url)
if img_response.status_code == 200:
    with open(filename, 'wb') as f:
        f.write(img_response.content)