APOD Search

[astrostu]

During the shutdown I realised that most of the English mirror sites don't have the search facility that the main site has. So I created one: http://strudel.org.uk/apod/.

You can search by words, by phrase (put it in quotation marks) and limit results to those without specific words (put a minus sign directly before the word you don't want). I've also made an advanced search that lets you search by position on the sky and by type of astronomical object. To make the position search I parsed each APOD explanation looking for deep-sky objects and ran them through a position look-up service I wrote (http://strudel.org.uk/lookUP/) that queries services such as Simbad, NED, SkyBot etc.

I've done a few test searches since the main site came back online and the results are pretty similar to the main APOD search. Like the main site I've kept the standard APOD styling although I only show 50 results per page so that your browser isn't overwhelmed by thousands of images. With each result I include the credit line, "tags" (types of object identified from name-resolved objects in the description) and links to translations (not every APOD is translated so these links may not always work).

You can get the results in JSON-p format if you like that sort of thing e.g. http://www.strudel.org.uk/apod/json/?q= ... k=myfnname I was contemplating outputting VOTable results too but APOD may be too broad in wavelength/sky/time coverage to neatly fit into a VO service. Also, I don't have projection info etc. Potentially this could be solved by running each image through a local copy of astrometry.net but that is a bit too much work for me to get up and running at the moment.

I hope it is useful. If anyone has ideas for extra features please let me know.

Clear skies.

[geckzilla]

Thanks Stuart. Very nice work!

[rstevenson]

Very nice! I particularly like the compact view, showing thumbnails only, which is useful if you have some idea what the image is that you're looking for, but only a vague idea of the particular APOD title.

Rob