APOD Linked Data

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astrostu
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APOD Linked Data

Post by astrostu » Fri Mar 21, 2014 11:54 am

I maintain the APOD Twitter account (@apod) and created a backup search engine during the NASA shutdown last year (http://apod.it). As a result of these things I've gradually built up a database of parsed APOD entries including the titles, descriptions, dates, credit lines and URLs for the images. I've also extracted named astronomical objects from the text descriptions and then found their RA/Dec positions on the sky.

I thought it was probably best to share this text database with others mostly to save people the need to do all the text parsing themselves. I've converted it into JSON-LD (http://json-ld.org/) which is a Javascript Object Notation (JSON) file with some extra information to describe what the data are. I even had some helpful input from one of the authors of the JSON-LD specification to make sure my output was valid. You can find it via https://github.com/slowe/apod/ (the raw version of the file is around 14 MB). Here is an example of what an individual APOD entry looks like:

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{
    "id": "http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140313.html",
    "date": "2014-03-13",
    "title": "Messier 63: The Sunflower Galaxy",
    "image": "http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1403/M63_PS1V10snyder900.jpg",
    "thumb": "http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/calendar/S_140313.jpg",
    "text": "A bright spiral galaxy of the northern sky, <a href=\"http://messier.seds.org/m/m063.html\">Messier 63</a> is about 25 million light-years distant in the loyal constellation <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canes_Venatici\">Canes Venatici</a>. Also cataloged as NGC 5055, the majestic <a href=\"ap100109.html\">island universe</a> is nearly 100,000 light-years across. That's about the size of our own <a href=\"ap080104.html\">Milky Way</a> Galaxy. Known by the popular moniker, The Sunflower Galaxy, M63 sports a bright yellowish core in <a href=\"http://billsnyderastrophotography.com/?page_id=4163\">this sharp, colorful galaxy portrait.</a> Its sweeping blue spiral arms are streaked with cosmic dust lanes and dotted with pink star forming regions. A dominant member of a known <a href=\"http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/galgrps/m101.html\">galaxy group</a>, M63 has faint, extended features that could be the result of gravitational <a href=\"http://burro.cwru.edu/JavaLab/GalCrashWeb/\">interactions</a> with nearby galaxies. In fact, M63 <a href=\"http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/cosmic_classroom/ multiwavelength_astronomy/multiwavelength_astronomy/\">shines across</a> the electromagnetic spectrum and is thought to have <a href=\"http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0701125\">undergone</a> bursts of intense <a href=\"http://cass.ucsd.edu/public/tutorial/Starbursts.html\">star formation</a>.",
    "credit": "<a href=\"http://billsnyderastrophotography.com/?page_id=2\">Bill Snyder</a> (at <a href=\"http://www.sierra-remote.com/index.php\">Sierra Remote Observatories</a>)",
    "objects": [
        {
            "name": "M63",
            "ra": "198.9555375",
            "dec": "42.0292889",
            "category": [
                "5.3.2.4"
            ]
        },
        {
            "name": "Sunflower Galaxy",
            "ra": "198.9555375",
            "dec": "42.0292889",
            "category": [
                "5.3.2.4"
            ]
        },
        {
            "name": "NGC 5055",
            "ra": "198.9555375",
            "dec": "42.0292889",
            "category": [
                "5.3.2.4"
            ]
        }
    ]
}
It isn't automatically updated everyday (although if I worked out how that could probably happen) so it'll always be a bit behind. However, it might be interesting for people who want to look at the archive of APODs e.g. I created a heatmap of astronomical objects mentioned in APOD descriptions at http://apod.it/map.html The file should be straightforward to use for anyone who can parse a text file. It should also be possible to read into a simple python script e.g.

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import json
json_data = open('apod.json')
data = json.load(json_data)
Let me know if you have any comments (or corrections).

Clear skies,

Stuart

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geckzilla
Ocular Digitator
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Joined: Wed Sep 12, 2007 12:42 pm
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Re: APOD Linked Data

Post by geckzilla » Fri Mar 21, 2014 4:05 pm

Very nice, Stu. Thanks for all your work on this!
Just call me "geck" because "zilla" is like a last name.

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