Gets a random picture from the nasa APOD.

README.md

APOD Desktop

To set this up you'll need to set your desktop background to slideshow mode. Create a directory in your pictures folder called APOD The script will put pictures in the directory. Set up a windows service to run the script once a day. profit! The script also creates a file on your desktop named description.txt it contains the pictures descript in a nice readable format if you're curious. Be careful when changing the APOD_DIRECTORY! This directory is removed and recreated very often so don't set it to something important like your Pictures directory.

nasa_apod.py

import requests, json, getpass, os
requests.packages.urllib3.disable_warnings()

#Configuration variables.
API_KEY="DEMO_KEY" #You can replace this with your NASA api key if you'd like.
DESCRIPTION_FILE=r"C:\Users\{}\Desktop\description.txt".format(getpass.getuser()) #Where you want the description file put.
APOD_DIRECTORY=r"C:\Users\{}\Pictures\APOD".format(getpass.getuser()) #The directory where the image will be stored. Don't set this to something you don't want deleted!!!
API_ENDPOINT=r"https://api.nasa.gov/planetary/apod?api_key={}".format(API_KEY) #Don't really need to change this.


def make_lines(text):
	buf=""
	i=1
	for char in text:
		buf+=char
		if i > 80:
			buf+="\n"
			i=0
		i+=1
	return buf
os.system('rmdir /S /Q "{}"'.format(APOD_DIRECTORY))
os.mkdir(APOD_DIRECTORY)
req=requests.get(API_ENDPOINT, verify=False)
if req.status_code == requests.codes.ok:
	apod = json.loads(req.content.decode("utf-8"))
	f=open(DESCRIPTION_FILE,"w")
	f.write(make_lines(apod["explanation"].split(" "*3)[0]))
	f.close()
	r = requests.get(apod["hdurl"], verify=False, stream=True)
	with open(APOD_DIRECTORY+r"\image.png", 'ab') as f:
		for chunk in r.iter_content():
			f.write(chunk)

This is mostly because I have no idea what to set my desktop to usually. 😆