NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive, 1995–2026

Since June 16, 1995, NASA has published one astronomy image with an explanation daily. This dataset contains the full archive of 11,342 entries spanning 31 years, sourced from NASA's public APOD API. The dataset was uploaded to Hugging Face by Hari5115.

Use Cases

• Astronomy education based on daily images and professional explanations
• Multimedia content creation based on a large archive of curated space imagery
• Temporal analysis of astronomical imagery trends over 31 years
• Public domain image sourcing based on the described copyright status for many entries

Strengths

• 11,342 entries providing substantial historical depth
• 31 years of daily coverage from 1995 to 2026
• Images are accompanied by explanations written by professional astronomers
• Approximately 50% of entries are described as public domain NASA images

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment
• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download

Provenance

Source

NASA APOD API

Collection Method

Periodically refreshed via NASA's public API

Time Range

1995-06-16 to 2026

Freshness

Data is refreshed periodically via NASA's public API; last updated 2026-07-09 10:44:41.