The “Astronomy Picture of the Day” is a source of fantastic images. To take advantage of this resource, I went looking for a way to automatically set the current image as my Desktop background. A quick Google search turned up a perl script at www.haroldbakker.com. Although this was a great start, I wasn’t completely happy with the implementation of this script and decided to write my own.

The apod.pl script is written in perl and both sets the Desktop background and copies a description of the image to the Desktop as an html file. You can add the script to your Script menu and run it as appropriate. Even better, download the runApod.scpt applescript and have iCal set the Desktop at a convenient time. I’ve set up my computer to run the perl script early each morning so that I have a new Desktop background each day. Note that runApod.scpt expects apod.pl to be in “~/Library/Scripts/apod/”.