Home Assistant n8n Workflow: NASA APOD & Near-Earth Asteroid

Bring NASA’s latest space discoveries into your Home Assistant—automatically

This Home Assistant n8n Workflow fetches NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) and the closest near-Earth asteroid from NASA’s NEO feed, then upserts both as sensor entities in Home Assistant for dashboard viewing.

What this workflow does

• Runs daily at 6:00 AM (or you can start it manually via a manual trigger).
• Calls the NASA APOD API to retrieve today’s picture metadata, including thumbnail URLs for video content.
• Formats and upserts APOD data to Home Assistant as sensor.nasa_apod—including title, date, media type, image/thumbnail URL, and a NASA explanation capped to a configurable `280-character` length.
• Calls NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) feed for a rolling 3-day window starting today.
• Flattens, sorts, and selects the nearest asteroid by miss distance, then extracts key fields such as distance, size, speed, a hazard flag, and the total count of matched close-approach entries.
• Upserts the nearest-asteroid details to Home Assistant as sensor.nasa_asteroid.

Use cases

• Daily dashboards showing NASA APOD with a fresh image/thumbnail and short explanation.
• Home Assistant screens for near-Earth asteroid awareness—always highlighting the closest object from the next few days.
• Automation engineers and SaaS operators demonstrating reliable API-to-home dashboard patterns in n8n.

Technical details

• Nodes/tech stack: set, code, sticky note, http request, home assistant, manual trigger.
• NASA authentication: add a NASA API key from https://api.nasa.gov as an HTTP Query Auth credential (e.g., api_key), used by both NASA HTTP requests.
• Home Assistant authentication: configure a Home Assistant API credential (base URL + long-lived access token) and select it in both Home Assistant upsert steps.
• Configurable: schedule time, asteroid look-ahead window end date, APOD explanation length, and target entity IDs (sensor.nasa_apod, sensor.nasa_asteroid).