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.
A Map of Asteroid Vesta
Vesta is a huge rock 500 kilometers across that orbits out past Mars . Last week, the above map of Vesta created using the Hubble Space Telescope was released showing a rugged…
Luna 9: First Soft Lander
The Luna 9 spacecraft above performed the first soft landing on another planetary body. Following a series of failures, the Soviet probe touched down in the Moon's Oceanus…
Isaac Newton Explains the Solar System
Sir Isaac Newton changed the world. Born in 1643, Newton was only an above-average student. But he went home from Cambridge one summer in 1665, thought a lot about the physical…
Apollo 17: Boulder on the Moon
Twenty five years ago humans roamed the Moon . Pictured here during the last moon landing , scientist-astronaut Harrison Schmitt was photographed standing next to a huge, split…
Rivers in the Sun
The surface of the Sun is shifting. By watching sunspots , it has long been known that our Sun rotates. It was also known that the center of the Sun rotates faster than the poles.…
A Partial Eclipse in Southern Skies
Location is everything, especially if you want to see a Solar Eclipse . These fleeting events are only visible to those in the path of the Moon's shadow as it races across the…
Dark Sky, Bright Sun
In low Earth orbit there is not enough atmosphere to diffuse and scatter sunlight, so shadows are black and the sky is dark - even when the Sun shines. The harsh lighting produced…
Infrared Helix
Five hundred light years from Earth, in the constellation Aquarius , a sun-like star is dying. Its last few thousand years have produced the Helix , a well studied and nearby…
Arp 230: Two Spirals in One?
Is this one galaxy or two? Analysis of Arp 230 has shown evidence that this seemingly single spiral galaxy is actually the result of the recent collision of two spiral galaxies.…
The United States at Night
This is what the United States of America looks like at night! Can you find your favorite US city on this image? Surprisingly, city lights make this task quite possible. The above…
Cassini To Saturn
Scheduled for launch in October, the Cassini spacecraft will spend seven years traveling through the Solar System -- its destination, Saturn . On arrival Cassini will begin an…
Infrared Trifid
The Trifid nebula (M20) is a bright star forming region in Sagittarius , 5000 light years from Earth. In visible light , the interstellar gas cloud is crossed by dark, obscuring…
A Fleeting Eclipse
A lunar eclipse can be viewed in a leisurely fashion. Visible to anyone on the night side of planet Earth (weather permitting), totality often lasts an hour or so as the moon…
Zodiacal Light
Sometimes the sky itself seems to glow. Usually, this means you are seeing a cloud reflecting sunlight or moonlight. If the glow appears as a faint band of light running across…
A Fisheye View of Comet Hale-Bopp
Thousands of stars, several constellations, a planet and a comet all graced the western horizon over Ujue, Spain just after sunset on April 4th, 1997. Because the picture was…
The Snake Nebula in Ophiuchus
What slithers there? The dark winding lanes visible in part of the constellation Ophiuchus belong to the Snake Nebula. The Snake Nebula is a series of dark absorption clouds made…
A Star Forming Region in the LMC
Stars sometimes form in colorful ways. Pictured above is a small region in the nearby LMC galaxy where stars are forming. After a star is born , it may do several things to…
IP Pegasi: Spiral Star
Spiral arms aren't just for galaxies . A hot disk of gas surrounding a compact white dwarf star in the constellation of Pegasus has recently been revealed to be imprinted with…
A Universe in a Box
Is this our universe? Possibly. It is one computerized guess of how gas in the universe was distributed billions of years ago, at redshift 3, when the universe was only a quarter…
Bright Meteor, Dark Sky
Has Orion the Hunter acquired a new weapon? If you turn your head sideways (counterclockwise) you might notice the familiar constellation of Orion , particularly the three…
Super Typhoon Winnie
Super Typhoon Winnie raged through parts of the Eastern Hemisphere last week. Swirling in the Pacific Ocean with winds in excess of 160 miler per hour, Winnie became one of the…
Io: The Prometheus Plume
Two sulfurous eruptions are visible on Jupiter's volcanic moon Io in this color composite Galileo image . On the left, over Io's limb, a new bluish plume rises about 86 miles…
Astro 1 In Orbit
In December of 1990, the Space Shuttle Columbia carried an array of astronomical telescopes high above the Earth's obscuring atmosphere to observe the Universe at ultraviolet and…
Pictured: An Ancient Martian?
Alien! Alien? Is this what an ancient Martian looked like? The tube-like form on the above highly magnified image is now believed by many to be a fossil of a simple Martian…
Viewing discoveries from 8 September 1997 through 16 August 1997.