Browse NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day archive by date and media: Archive Discoveries
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A Leonid Bolide Over Kansas
The 1998 Leonid Meteor Shower featured many bright events. Extremely bright meteors, known as bolides or fireballs , can briefly glow brighter than the full moon . Pictured above…
Seven Leonids Over Wise Observatory
More Leonids were visible at some places than others. In Israel, early in the morning of 17 November, it rained meteors though a clear sky. Observers there reported a peak rate…
A Leonid Meteor Explodes
Click on the above image and watch a Leonid meteor explode. The tremendous heat generated by the collision of a small sand-bit moving at 70 kilometers/second with the Earth's…
The High Energy Crab Nebula
This is the mess that is left when a star explodes. The Crab Nebula is so energetic that it glows in every kind of light known. Shown above are images of the Crab Nebula from…
Catching Falling Stardust
This carrot shaped track is actually little more than 5 hundredths of an inch long. It is the trail of a meteroid through the high-tech substance aerogel exposed to space by the…
Green Fireball
“Goodness, Gracious, Green Balls Of Fire!”, might have been an appropriate theme song title for the 1998 Leonid meteor shower . Many observers , like astrophotographer Steve Dunn…
Bright Leonids
Rich in bright and awesome fireballs , the Leonid Meteor Shower came early this year. In fact, judging from meteor watcher reports the peak came nearly 15 hours earlier than the…
Close-Up of the Bubble Nebula
It's the bubble versus the cloud. NGC 7635, the Bubble Nebula , is being pushed out by the stellar wind of massive central star BD+602522. Next door, though, lives a giant…
NGC 7635: The Bubble Nebula
What created this huge space bubble? A massive star that is not only bright and blue, but also emitting a fast stellar wind of ionized gas . The Bubble Nebula is actually the…
Leonids 1998: A Safe Meteor Storm
You're in no danger. During the meteor storm occurring tonight and tomorrow, thousands of bits of ice and rock will likely rain onto the Earth . Few, if any, will hit the ground .…
Deimos: A Small Martian Moon
Mars has two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos . Pictured above is Deimos , the smaller moon of Mars . In fact, Deimos is one of the smallest known moons in the Solar System measuring…
Surveyor Slides
“Safe!” In September 1967 ( during regular season play ), the Surveyor 5 lander actually slid several feet while making a successful soft landing on the Moon's Mare…
A Leonid Fireball From 1966
This bright fireball meteor was photographed from Table Mountain Observatory during the peak of the annual Leonid meteor shower on November 17, 1966. That was a good year for…
GLAST Gamma-Ray Sky Simulation
This simulated image models the intensities of gamma rays with over 40 million times the energy of visible light, and represents how the sky might appear to the proposed Gamma-ray…
Aurora Above
On some nights the sky is the most interesting show in town. This picture captures a particularly active and colorful display of aurora that occurred a month ago high above Alaska…
NGC 3132: The Eight Burst Nebula
It's the dim star, not the bright one, near the center of NGC 3132 that created this odd but beautiful planetary nebula . Nicknamed the Eight-Burst Nebula and the Southern Ring…
WR124: Stellar Fireball
Some stars explode in slow motion. Rare, massive Wolf-Rayet stars are so tumultuous and hot they are disintegrating right before our telescopes. Glowing gas globs each over 30…
Leonid Meteor Shower Next Week
Early next week, a spectacular meteor storm is expected: the 1998 Leonids . It is widely thought that that the meteors from the Leonids meteor shower are just small pieces of…
Globular Cluster 47 Tucanae
Stars come in bunches. Of the over 200 globular star clusters that orbit the center of our Milky Way Galaxy , 47 Tucanae is the second brightest globular cluster (behind Omega…
Cutaway Callisto: Ice, Rock, and Ocean?
Cruising past the moons of reigning gas giant Jupiter, Voyager and Galileo have returned tantalizing evidence for a liquid water ocean beneath the surface of Europa . Now…
Natural Saturn On The Cassini Cruise
What you could see approaching Saturn aboard an interplanetary cruise ship would closely resemble this subtly shaded view of the gorgeous ringed gas giant. Processed by the Hubble…
Cosmology Solved?
At the Nature of the Universe Debate held last month at the Smithsonian , top cosmologists P. James E. Peebles ( Princeton ) and Michael S. Turner ( Chicago ) argued over whether…
Sextans A: A Seemingly Square Galaxy
What's bothering local galaxy Sextans A ? A small dwarf irregular galaxy spanning 5 thousand light years across, Sextans A is located only 5 million light-years away. Named for…
PG 1115+080 A Ghost of Lensing Past
In this tangle of quasars and galaxies lies a clue to the expansion rate of the universe. A diffuse glow evident in the picture on the left reveals a normal elliptical galaxy .…
Viewing discoveries from 25 November 1998 through 2 November 1998.