Getting Started

Last updated 1 year ago

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Getting Started

Welcome to Astronomy API, a web API for retrieving astronomical information.

Obtaining an Application ID and a Secret

To make API calls, you will first need to create an account. Go to the page to create your free account.

After creating an account, you must obtain an Application ID and an Application Secret key by clicking the "Create Application" button from your dashboard. You will be directed to the "View Application" page for the application you just created.

The Application Secret is visible to you only once during application creation. Save it somewhere because there's no way to retrieve it back. If you lost your secret create a new application and delete the old application.

You will use the Application ID and the Application Secret to authenticate with the Astronomy API with Basic Authentication.

You can view your Application ID later, by clicking the name of the specific application on the .

Be sure to set the Origin to the domain of the website when creating an application. If you're planning to use the API on a webpage. The API will respond with a Access Allow Origin header with the domain you provide.

This is needed if you're calling the API from a web page client since web browsers need CORS setup for remote requests to work.

Basic Authentication

When making API calls to endpoints requiring authentication, you must use the above credentials to create a string that must be used as the authentication string. The algorithm to create the string is very simple. Below are implementations of several commonly used languages.

JS

const authString = btoa(`applicationId:applicationSecret`);

PHP

$authString = base64_encode("applicationId:applicationSecret");

Python

import base64
userpass = "applicationId:applicationSecret"
authString = base64.b64encode(userpass.encode()).decode()

The encrypted string must be provided in the API request's Authorization header, after the term Basic followed by a space.

"Authorization: Basic YourAuthStringHere"

In an event of an authentication failure, a 403 Forbidden response will be returned, which probably means you encrypted the string incorrectly, or your credentials are wrong.

Successful requests always respond with HTTP code 200.

Sample curl request

curl --location --request GET 'https://api.astronomyapi.com/api/v2/bodies' 
\ --header 'Authorization: Basic YourAuthStringHere'

NextBodies