Apogee

A pure C CLI tool to fetch and display the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Apogee is a designed to be lightweight and fast.

It fetches the daily JSON payload from NASA's API, download the target image, decode it entirely in memory, and translate the pixels into true-color ANSI half-blocks.

🪧 Demo

⭐ Features

• Terminal-native rendering: Uses 24-bit RGB ANSI escape codes and ▀ (half-block) characters for high-resolution terminal output
• Dynamic scaling: Automatically detects your terminal window size via ioctl and scales the image to fit perfectly without breaking your scrollback
• Minimal dependencies: Written in pure C using libcurl for network requests, cJSON for parsing, and the stb_image header for decoding
• API safety: Includes robust error handling (and explicit parsing for NASA's OVER_RATE_LIMIT throttle restrictions)

🛠️ Prerequisites

You only need a standard C build environement and libcurl installed.

• gcc or clang
• make
• libcurl development headers (e.g., sudo apt install libcurl4-openssl-dev on Debian based distro, sudo pacman -S curl on Arch based distro or brew install curl)

💾 Installation & build

Clone the repository and compile using the included Makefile:

git clone https://github.com/wirenux/apogee.git
cd apogee
make

🕹️ Usage

You will need a free API key from NASA's API Portal.

Once you have it you can run to tool by passing the key as an environment variable.

Standard run:

export NASA_API_KEY="your_nasa_key"
make run

Or directly via the binary:

NASA_API_KEY="your_nasa_api_key" ./build/apogee

Demo mode:

If you just want to test the tool without an API key, you can bypass authentication using the shared NASA demo key.

(Note: The demo key is heavily rate-limited globally, so if it don't work just try with your own API key ;-) )

make run ARGS="--demo"

Or directly via the binary:

./build/apogee --demo

🧠 Use of AI

In this project the AI was used for:

• README Structure / Skeleton
• Mind Mapping

📃 License

MIT LICENSE