In updating the @apod Twitter feed, and providing an APOD Search, I've created a database of the text explanations for every Astronomy Picture of the Day. These are parsed from the original web pages. At the same time I have parsed the text to identify likely astronomical objects and piped those through LookUp to find their Right Ascension/Declination and types (using the AVM classification). I've converted the results of this into a large JSON-LD file.
For each entry you'll get:
- id - The URL
- date - A YYYY-MM-DD date string
- title - The title
- image - The URL of the image
- thumb - The URL of the thumbnail image
- media - [optional] The URL when the image isn't an image. This could be a link to YouTube, Vimeo, a Flash file etc.
- text - The escaped HTML for the description of the entry.
- credit - The escaped HTML for the credit line.
- objects - [optional] An array of extracted objects. Each one contains:
- name - The name of the astronomical object
- ra - The Right Ascension
- dec - The Declination
- category - An array of AVM (Astronomy Visualization Metadata) categories (see http://www.virtualastronomy.org/AVM_DRAFTVersion12_rlh02.pdf) for the object.
All the explanations come from APOD so please make sure you credit them if you use this (e.g. APOD is created by Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)). If you can credit me too that would be wonderful.
Note that the classification of objects and their coordinates comes from LookUP. LookUP gets data from SIMBAD (operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France), the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED; operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), the SkyBoT project (set up under the auspice of the French Ministry for National Education and CNRS), the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia (Jean Schneider, CNRS/LUTH - Paris Observatory), the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams Supernovae List (IAU, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory), the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Constellation List (Larry McNish), the SDSS SkyServer, the Minor Planet & Comet Ephemeris Service (IAU Minor Planet Center), and the excellent WCSTools package (Doug Mink, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory).