APOD Viewer v1

I love APOD - Astronomy Picture of the Day - as I'm privately quite interested in the universe and all that stuff. But I do not visit APOD daily, so once in a while I browse the site.

But, wouldn't it be nice to have a slideshow with the pictures?

Surprise! PowerShell to the rescue.

This script really show the power of PowerShell. It has a web client, caculates dates and controls Internet Explorer. Give it a shot. If you make any clever changes, please post those as comments. I have a big wishlist myself, but this got me going.

function apod {
    param([int] $days=1) # show latest picture by default
    $baseurl="http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/"
    
    # create IE COM object
    $ie = new-object -com internetexplorer.application

    # create .net object
    $webclient = new-object system.net.webclient

    # date manipulation
    $date=[datetime]::now
    $date.AddDays(1) # start tomorrow as the loops starts by subtracting a day

    $ie.fullscreen=$true
    $ie.visible=$true
    # You may have to press the window in the taskbar to make it appear


    # An easy way to do a for loop - could have used for, but as said this is easier
    1..$days | % {

        # back one day
        $date=$date.AddDays(-1)

        # construct url
        $url=$baseurl+"ap" + $date.tostring("yyMMdd") + ".html"
        $url

        # get HTML page
        $html = $webclient.downloadstring($url)
        $html.length

        # Pick up the link the picture has - links to the high resolution version
        # I want to display
        # This is not idiot proff coding - but, hey, scripts are easy to change

        $html -match '<a href="([^"]*)">\W*<img'
        $matches.count
        # get the value matching the pattern in parenthesis
        $img=$matches[1]
        $img

        # show high resolution picture
        $ie.navigate($baseurl+$img)
        
        # wait for IE to load picture
        while ($ie.busy) {sleep -s 1;"busy"}

        # give me 10 seconds to enjoy the picture
        sleep -s 10

    }

    # shutdown IE
    $ie.quit()

    $ie=$null

    # wish list: load pictures overlapping (but keep presentation interval)
    # wish list: include some kind of fancy transition
    # wish list: pick out the explanation and present it in some way
    # add our own...

}