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.
Abell 1795: A Galaxy Cluster's Cooling Flow
Throughout the Universe , galaxies tend to swarm in groups ranging from just a handful of members to casts of thousands. Astronomers have realized since the early 1970s that the…
Earth's San Andreas Fault
The Earth's surface is broken. Cracks in the Earth's crust known as faults can run for hundreds of kilometers. These faults are frequently the sites of major earthquakes as the…
Reflecting Merope
In the famous Pleiades star cluster , a star's light is slowly destroying a passing cloud of gas and dust . The star, Merope , lies just off the upper right edge of this recently…
Layered Mars: An Ancient Water World?
Pictured above, layers upon layers stretch across the floor of West Candor Chasma within the immense martian Valles Marineris . Covering an area 1.5 by 2.9 kilometers, the full…
The Circinus Galaxy
Powerful forces are at play in the nearby Circinus Galaxy. Hot gas, colored pink, is being ejected out of the spiral galaxy from the central region. Much of Circinus ' tumultuous…
Earth's North Magnetic Pole
A magnetic compass does not point toward the true North Pole of the Earth. Rather, it more closely points toward the North Magnetic Pole of the Earth. The North Magnetic Pole is…
SN 1006: Pieces of the Cosmic Ray Puzzle
Research balloon flights conducted in 1912 by Austrian physicist Victor Hess revealed that the Earth was constantly bombarded by high energy radiation from space - which came to…
A Frosty Crater On Mars
In the martian southern hemisphere, autumn has arrived. As on planet Earth, the cooler temperatures bring a seasonal frost to the landscape. Of course on Mars, the surface…
Palomar 13's Last Stand
Globular star cluster Palomar 13 has roamed the halo of our Milky Way Galaxy for the last 12 billion years. The apparently sparse cluster of stars just left of center in this…
Leonids from Orbit
Here is what a meteor shower looks like from orbit. During the peak of the 1997 Leonid Meteor Shower , the MSX satellite imaged from above 29 meteors over a 48 minute period…
BZ Cam Bow Shock
BZ Cam is a binary star system that is not well understood. In most cataclysmic variables , matter from a normal star accumulates on the surface of the companion white dwarf star,…
Earth at Night
This is what the Earth looks like at night. Can you find your favorite country or city ? Surprisingly, city lights make this task quite possible. Human-made lights highlight…
Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita
Last year, the 1999 Leonids Meteor Shower came to a tremendous crescendo. Observers in Europe observed a sharp peak in the number of meteors visible around 0210 UTC during the…
A High Energy Fleet
Like a fleet of futuristic starcruisers, NASA's highly successful series of High Energy Astrophysical Observatory (HEAO) spacecraft appear poised over planet Earth. Labeled A, B,…
Long Leonid
Just last week this long lovely Leonid shower meteor arced through the night. Captured on November 17/18 by photographer Bob Yen, the meteor trail spans about 70 times the…
Cassini At Jupiter: Red Spot Movie
Everything is big on Jupiter , the solar system's reigning gas giant. For example, Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a hurricane-like storm system at least twice the diameter of planet…
The Orion Nebula in Hydrogen
The Great Nebula in Orion can be found just below and to the left of the easily identifiable belt of three stars in the popular constellation Orion . This fuzzy patch, visible to…
Fire on Earth
Sometimes, regions of planet Earth can be seen lit up with fire. Since fire is the rapid acquisition of oxygen, and since oxygen is a key indicator of life, fire on any planet…
A 2000 Leonid Through Orion
The Leonid Meteor Shower this year could be described as good but not great. During November 17 and 18 the Earth crossed through several streams of sand-sized grit left orbiting…
Our Dusty Universe
What's black & white and red all over? Add our universe to this list. Adrift in a vast sea of darkness are not only familiar bright stars but dust that glows predominantly in far-…
Jupiter And Family
This composite image features classic portraits of members of one of the Solar System's most prominent families - Jupiter and its four large “Galilean” moons. Starting from the…
Leonid Sunrise
Such beautiful things begin as grains of sand. Locked in an oyster a granule grows into an iridescent pearl, lustrous and lovely to behold. While hurtling through the atmosphere…
A Daytime Fireball in 1944
While stationed in central Africa in December 1944, Norman Appleton witnessed a meteor so bright he remembered it his entire life. Right before his eyes a tremendous smoking…
Coronal Rain, Solar Storm
In this picture , the Sun's surface is quite dark. A frame from a movie recorded on November 9th by the orbiting TRACE telescope, it shows coronal loops lofted over a solar active…
Viewing discoveries from 8 December 2000 through 15 November 2000.