my APOD site - Stardance

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@Jason_Mloza on my APOD site · 29 days ago

What did you make?
I built a NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day website that uses NASA’s APOD API to fetch and display the picture of the day, its title, date, explanation, and copyright information. I also added a custom interface so users can explore the content instead of just seeing raw API data.

What was challenging?
The hardest part was getting the API, environment variables, and frontend to work together properly. It worked locally but initially gave me a 403 error after deployment, which forced me to understand the difference between local and production environments and fix my Vercel configuration. I also had to work through several smaller bugs while building the site.

What are you proud of?
I’m proud that I actually got the project from an idea and tutorial into a working, publicly deployed website. The biggest thing for me was seeing data from a real NASA API turn into an actual experience that someone else can visit and use. I also learned a lot from the problems I ran into instead of giving up when things broke.

What should people know so they can test your project?
The project doesn’t require an account or any special setup. Just open the live website and wait for the APOD to load. The site fetches the current Astronomy Picture of the Day from NASA, so the content will change as NASA publishes new APODs. If an APOD is a video rather than an image, the site displays the available media accordingly.

Try project → See source code →

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@Jason_Mloza on my APOD site · 29 days ago

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NASA APOD
A simple web experience for exploring NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.
I built this project to practice working with APIs and learn how to turn data from an external service into an actual web experience. The site fetches the current APOD from NASA and dynamically displays its title, date, media, explanation, and copyright information.
It started as a project I was experimenting with and went through a few frustrating bugs before I finally got it working the way I wanted. Getting the API request, environment variables, and frontend rendering working together was the part that taught me the most.