Browse NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day archive by date and media: Archive Discoveries
Browse the NASA APOD archive without needing the exact date first. Filter by media type and keep moving deeper into older images and videos.
An Energetic Radio Galaxy
The radio and optical emission seen in the above superposed images of the radio galaxy 3C368 indicate that energetic processes are at work. A radio galaxy is a galaxy that is…
The International Ultraviolet Explorer
The International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) was launched by a NASA Delta rocket in 1978 to provide a space telescope for ultraviolet astronomy. A collaborative project among…
A Venusian Landscape
This computer generated view of a Venusian volcano was created using data from NASA's Magellan spacecraft . Magellan used its onboard radar to map the surface of Venus which is…
A Venus Landing
This image is part of the first color panoramic view from Venus . It was transmitted by a TV camera on the Soviet Venera 13 lander which parachuted to the surface on March 1,…
Star Trails in Southern Skies
As the Earth spins on its axis, the sky seems to rotate around us. This motion produces the beautiful concentric arcs traced out by the stars in this time exposure of the night…
Orion's Horsehead Nebula
The black indentation to the red emission nebula seen just to the right of center of the above photograph is one of the most famous features in any nebulae on the sky. Because of…
Mimas: Small Moon with A Big Crater
Mimas is one of the smaller moons of Saturn but shows one of the largest impact craters! In fact, if the impact had been much greater, it would have disrupted the entire…
Titan: Saturn's Smog Moon
The largest moon of Saturn is a rare wonder. Titan is the only one of Saturn 's moons with an atmosphere, and one of only two moons in the Solar System with this distinction (…
Standing on the Moon
Pictured, the second person to walk on the Moon : Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin. During this Apollo 11 mission, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon while Michael Collins…
One Small Step
On July 20th, 1969, a human first set foot on the Moon . Pictured above is the first lunar footprint. The footprint and distinction of the first person to walk on the Moon belong…
GL 105C: The Coolest Star?
Is the dim star to the upper right of this false-color picture the coolest possible normal star? From this recent picture by the Hubble Space Telescope , astronomers have…
The Small Cloud of Magellan
Almost unknown to casual observers in the northern hemisphere, the southern sky contains two diffuse wonders known as the Magellanic Clouds . The Magellanic Clouds are small…
The Large Cloud of Magellan
Magellan and his crew had plenty of time to study the southern sky during their famous voyage around the world. As a result, two fuzzy cloud like objects, nestled among the…
Thousands of Coma Cluster Galaxies
Almost every object in the above photograph is a galaxy . The Coma Cluster of galaxies pictured is a dense cluster containing many thousands of galaxies . Many of these galaxies…
Rockets and Robert Goddard
Robert H. Goddard , one of the founding fathers of modern rocketry, was born in Worcester Massachusetts in 1882. As a 16 year old, Goddard read H.G. Wells' science fiction classic…
Space Station Mir Over Earth
This picture of the Russian space station Mir over the Pacific Ocean was recorded by the Space Shuttle Discovery in February 1995. During this mission Discovery performed a…
The Far Side
This historic picture was humanity's first glimpse of the far side of the Moon . It was taken by the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 in October of 1959. Luna 3 followed closely on the…
Elliptical Galaxy M87
Elliptical galaxy M87 is a type of galaxy that looks much different than our own Milky Way Galaxy . But even for an elliptical galaxy M 87 is peculiar. M87 is much bigger than an…
Spiral Galaxy M83
Long winding spiral arms are clearly evident on this spectacular picture of the spiral galaxy M83. The blue color of the spiral arms is caused by the relatively large fraction of…
Proplyds: Infant Solar Systems
The fuzzy blobs seen above may be some of the first ever images of entire solar systems forming right before our eyes. This close up of the Orion Nebulae taken by the Hubble Space…
White Dwarfs Cool
The circled stars in the above picture are from a class that is hard to see in the cosmos: white dwarfs . The entire photo covers a small region near the center of a globular…
The Last Moon Shot
In 1865 Jules Verne predicted the invention of a space capsule that could carry people. In his science fiction story “From the Earth to the Moon” , he outlined his vision of…
The Milky Way's Center
NASA's COBE satellite scanned the heavens at infrared wavelengths in 1990 and produced this premier view of the central region of our own Milky Way Galaxy. The Milky Way is a…
Distant Galaxies
This Hubble Space Telescope image of a group of faint galaxies “far, far away” is a snap shot of the Universe when it was young. The bluish, irregularly shaped galaxies revealed…
Viewing discoveries from 30 September 1995 through 7 September 1995.