Wondering if there was an RSS feed for the excellent Astronomy Picture of the Day, I googled, and found that jwz had created just such a feed a while back.

It also occurred to me that the latest images and press releases coming from Saturn (and Mars) would make excellent candidates for RSS feeds - the data is interesting and comes in unpredictable bursts. Well, NASA doesn't seem to have any (that I could find), so I threw together a few scrapers to get what I'm after. Feel free to use them as well, but be warned that they are based on pagescrapers - so they might go down at any moment.

For Saturn: Cassini-Huygens Probe - Latest Press Images Feed, the Planetary Photojournal, and the raw feed of Cassini Images (this last one could be wobbly due to aggressive caching on JPL's side).

For other Planets (and the Sun):

- Sun [last updated 3.13.2004]
- Mercury [last updated 1.18.2001]
- Venus [last updated 6.27.2003]
- Earth [last updated 7.7.2004]
- Mars [last updated 7.8.2004]
- Jupiter [last updated 11.13.2003]
- Uranus [last updated 8.24.2000]
- Neptune [last updated 4.01.2000]
- Pluto [last updated 3.28.1998]
or, just get 'em all with the All Planets (and Sun) feed [last updated 7.9.2004].

As for the Mars Rovers images, I'm still trying to figure out the best method to do generate an RSS feed for that - they don't have a good scrapable press-images page, and their raw image feeds are scattered and noisy - five cameras on two robots with sporadic updating. Seems like the Hubble telescope deserves an RSS feed too. Lemme know if there's any problems with these feeds or if there are other better ones out there.

1 Comments +