https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=528131
Bug ID: 528131
Summary: Astronomy (NASA) Picture of the Day fails every day
since APOD moved to science.nasa.gov
Classification: Plasma
Product: plasmashell
Version First 6.8.2
Reported In:
Platform: CachyOS
OS: Linux
Status: REPORTED
Severity: normal
Priority: NOR
Component: Picture of the Day wallpaper
Assignee: [email protected]
Reporter: [email protected]
CC: [email protected], [email protected]
Target Milestone: 1.0
SUMMARY
The "Astronomy (NASA)" Picture of the Day wallpaper provider no longer works,
on any day. NASA moved APOD to a new site and the provider's parsing no longer
finds an image.
STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. Set the wallpaper plugin to Picture of the Day, provider Astronomy (NASA).
OBSERVED RESULT
No picture is loaded (black or unchanged wallpaper). Seen on CachyOS (Plasma
6.8.2) and Fedora 45.
EXPECTED RESULT
Today's APOD image is used as the wallpaper.
SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS
KDE Plasma Version: 6.8.2 (kdeplasma-addons 6.8.2)
Distributions: CachyOS, Fedora 45
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
- potd/plugins/providers/apodprovider.cpp downloads https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/
and searches the page for <a href="image/...">.
- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ now answers 301 to
https://science.nasa.gov/apod/, a new WordPress page. It contains no link
starting with "image/", so the regex never matches and the provider emits
error(). I checked this by running the same pattern on the downloaded page.
- Scraping the new page is not reliable either: its og:image / twitter:image
still point to an image from June 2026, not today's picture.
- NASA offers a feed that has what the provider needs:
https://science.nasa.gov/feed/apod-basic/ (RSS, 30 items, newest first). Each
item has title, apod:credit / apod:copyright, apod:explanation and apod:hdurl
(direct image URL). I downloaded the hdurl of the first item and got a valid
JPEG. Image sizes in the feed vary per day (e.g. 6048x4030, 1600x1000,
960x991); they are the originals.
- api.nasa.gov/planetary/apod with DEMO_KEY returned HTTP 500 when I tried it,
so the feed seems the better source.
- Related but different cause: Bug 518709 (April; the old site sometimes
returned UTF-16 text that broke parsing). Bug 425058 (days when the picture is
a video).
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