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🪐 NASA JPL Horizons Ephemeris Scraper

🚀 Pull observer ephemerides and physical data in seconds. Get right ascension, declination, apparent magnitude, range, elongation, plus mean radius, mass, density, and rotation period for any solar-system body from NASA JPL Horizons.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-06-08 · 📊 Up to 28 fields per record · one record per ephemeris step · planets, moons, asteroids, comets, spacecraft

Turn NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Horizons system into clean, structured records you can drop into an observation planner, an orbital-mechanics study, a planetarium app, or a research notebook. Pick a body, an observing center, a time span, and a step size, and the Actor returns one row per epoch with the apparent sky position and the body's physical parameters attached to every row.

Coverage is the full Horizons catalog: the Sun, the eight planets, the Moon, Pluto, and any object addressable by a Horizons COMMAND id, including numbered asteroids (for example 433 Eros), comets (for example 1P Halley), and spacecraft (for example -125544 for the ISS). Observer geometry can be computed from Earth's center, the solar-system barycenter, the Sun, the Moon, or Mars.

📋 What the NASA JPL Horizons Ephemeris Scraper does

This Actor calls the public NASA JPL Horizons API in OBSERVER mode and returns one clean record per ephemeris step:

• Sky position — right ascension and declination in the ICRF frame.
• Brightness and geometry — apparent magnitude, surface brightness, range in astronomical units, range rate, solar elongation with its leading/trailing code, and the Sun-target-observer angle.
• Physical data — mean and equatorial radius, mass, density, GM, sidereal rotation and orbit periods, obliquity, geometric albedo, mean temperature, and escape speed, parsed from the body's Horizons header and attached to every row.

The NASA logo is used as the record image. Every record carries a scrapedAt timestamp.

🎬 Full Demo (🚧 Coming soon)

⚙️ Input

Example 1 — daily Mars ephemeris from Earth

{
"body":"499",
"center":"500@399",
"startTime":"2026-06-08",
"stopTime":"2026-06-18",
"stepSize":"1 d",
"maxItems":10
}

Example 2 — asteroid 433 Eros, geocentric, six-hour steps

{
"body":"custom",
"customBody":"433",
"center":"500@399",
"startTime":"2026-06-08",
"stopTime":"2026-06-10",
"stepSize":"6 h",
"maxItems":9
}

⚠️ Good to Know: the row count is set by your time span and step size. A 10-day span at 1 d yields about 11 rows. Some physical-data fields are not published for every body, so a field like geometricAlbedo or meanTemperatureK may be null for objects where Horizons does not provide it.

📊 Output

Each ephemeris record looks like this:

Real sample — ephemeris row

{
"imageUrl":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e5/NASA_logo.svg/512px-NASA_logo.svg.png",
"bodyName":"Mars (499)",
"bodyId":"499",
"centerName":"Earth (399)",
"centerSite":"GEOCENTRIC",
"dateUtc":"2026-Jun-08 00:00",
"raIcrf":"05 41 22.18",
"decIcrf":"+24 12 03.4",
"apparentMagnitude":1.64,
"surfaceBrightness":5.42,
"deltaAu":2.41887341,
"rangeRateKmS":18.742133,
"solarElongationDeg":21.3107,
"elongationCode":"T",
"sunTargetObserverDeg":18.4521,
"meanRadiusKm":3389.92,
"equatorialRadiusKm":3396.19,
"massKg":6.4171e23,
"densityGCm3":3.933,
"gmKm3S2":42828.375,
"siderealRotationPeriodHr":24.622962,
"siderealOrbitPeriodYr":1.88081578,
"obliquityToOrbitDeg":25.19,
"geometricAlbedo":0.15,
"meanTemperatureK":210,
"escapeSpeedKmS":5.027,
"scrapedAt":"2026-06-08T17:09:21.000Z",
"error":null
}

✨ Why choose this Actor

• Observer ephemeris and physical data in one record, ready for analysis.
• Works for planets, moons, Pluto, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft via Horizons ids.
• Choose the observing center: Earth, barycenter, Sun, Moon, or Mars.
• Flexible sampling with 1 d, 6 h, 30 m, or a step count.
• No account, no API key, and no Horizons client to build.

📈 How it compares to alternatives

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free Apify account using this sign-up link.
2. Open the NASA JPL Horizons Ephemeris Scraper.
3. Choose a body (or custom plus a customBody id) and an observing center.
4. Set startTime, stopTime, stepSize, and maxItems.
5. Click Start and grab your results when the run finishes.

💼 Business use cases

Observation planning

Research and analysis

Apps and tools

Education

🔌 Automating NASA JPL Horizons Ephemeris Scraper

Connect runs to the tools you already use:

• Make and Zapier to trigger runs and route records into sheets or databases.
• Slack to post an object's nightly position to a channel.
• Airbyte to load results into a warehouse.
• GitHub Actions to schedule periodic snapshots.
• Google Drive to archive each run's output.

🌟 Beyond business use cases

• Research: assemble long ephemeris series for an orbital study.
• Personal: plan a night of observing your favorite planet.
• Non-profit: power a community planetarium or outreach event.
• Experimentation: prototype a space app without wrangling the Horizons text format.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant

Paste your results into ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Microsoft Copilot and ask it to find the brightest night, plot range over time, or convert RA/Dec into alt/az for your location.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a NASA or JPL account or API key? No. The Actor reads the public NASA JPL Horizons API, which needs no login.

Which bodies can I query? Any object with a Horizons COMMAND id: planets, moons, Pluto, the Sun, numbered asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. Use the dropdown for major bodies or custom for everything else.

What is the observing center? Where the observer sits. Geocentric (500@399) gives the standard sky position from Earth. Barycenter, Sun, Moon, and Mars centers give other geometries.

What does the step size accept? Intervals like 1 d, 6 h, 30 m, or a plain count like 20 that splits the span into equal steps.

What frame are RA and Dec in? The ICRF (International Celestial Reference Frame), returned as raIcrf and decIcrf.

Why are some physical fields null? Horizons does not publish every physical parameter for every body. Fields it does not provide come back null rather than guessed.

Is the physical data on every row? Yes. The body's physical constants are parsed once and attached to each ephemeris row for convenience.

What does the elongation code mean? solarElongationDeg is the angle from the Sun; elongationCode marks whether the body is leading or trailing the Sun.

How fresh is the data? Each run queries Horizons live, so it reflects the current ephemeris computation.

Can I schedule this? Yes. Use Apify Schedules to refresh an object's ephemeris on any cadence.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Results are available through the Apify API, so you can pull them into any app, database, or workflow you already run.

🔗 Recommended Actors

• USNO Astronomical Almanac Scraper
• NOAA CoastWatch ERDDAP Ocean Data Scraper
• More science and reference data Actors in the ParseForge collection

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection.

🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form

⚠️ Disclaimer: independent tool, not affiliated with NASA or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Only publicly available data is collected.