NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

A self-updating gallery of cosmic wonders. A scheduled AWS Lambda fetches NASA's APOD every day and archives it to S3, no human in the loop.

open_in_new View on apod.nasa.gov

How it's built

I built this as a fully serverless pipeline. A scheduled Amazon EventBridge rule fires a Python Lambda once a day; the function calls NASA's public APOD API, stores the image and its metadata in S3, and rebuilds the JSON indexes this page reads. The page itself is static; the grid and the image viewer fetch those indexes directly from S3 with client-side JavaScript. No servers, no database, no CI/CD, and it costs under $0.01 per month to run. 

flowchart LR
EB["Amazon EventBridge
daily schedule"] --> L["AWS Lambda
Python"]
L <--> API["NASA APOD API"]
L --> S3["Amazon S3
images + JSON indexes"]
S3 --> P["This page
static, client-side fetch"]

One scheduled function keeps the archive, the indexes, and this gallery current, with no human in the loop.

I wrote a step-by-step guide to building this yourself: Build a Self-Updating NASA Photo Gallery on AWS for a Penny a Month.

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