Home Assistant NASA APOD + Nearest Asteroid Sensor (n8n)

Get NASA’s APOD and the nearest asteroid into Home Assistant—automatically

This n8n workflow fetches NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) and the closest near-Earth asteroid from NASA’s feeds, then upserts both results as Home Assistant sensors for dashboards and automations.

What this workflow does

• Runs daily at 6:00 AM (and can also be triggered on-demand via a manual trigger).
• Pulls NASA APOD using the NASA API (with thumbnail support enabled), then extracts:
  • APOD title, date, media type
  • Best-available image/thumbnail URL
  • Trims the explanation to 280 characters
• Upserts a Home Assistant sensor at sensor.nasa_apod with the APOD title as state and attributes including the image URL, explanation, media type, and date.
• Pulls NASA NEO data for today through the next three days.
• Flattens returned asteroids, sorts by miss distance, and selects the closest approach, including:
  • distance, estimated diameter, velocity
  • hazard flag
  • asteroid name and total count
• Upserts a Home Assistant sensor at sensor.nasa_asteroid with the asteroid name as state and relevant attributes.

Use cases

• Display NASA APOD and the latest space scene in a Home Assistant wall tablet or dashboard.
• Create automations that react to the hazard flag or update alerts when the closest asteroid changes.
• Give SaaS operators and automation engineers a clean example of API-to-Home Assistant sensor upsert patterns in n8n.

Technical details

• Nodes/blocks: set, code, sticky note, HTTP Request, Home Assistant, Manual Trigger
• NASA API key: create a free key at https://api.nasa.gov and add it as an HTTP Query Auth credential (api_key) for both requests.
• Home Assistant integration: configure instance URL and a long-lived access token, and select them in both Home Assistant upsert steps.