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.
The Great Nebula in Orion
Few astronomical sights excite the imagination like the nearby stellar nursery known as the Orion Nebula . The Nebula's glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an…
Methane Earth
Can you help in reducing this blanket of methane gas that is warming up our Earth ? Recent evidence holds that methane (CH 4 ) is second only to carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) in creating…
Reflection Nebula M78
An eerie blue glow and ominous columns of dark dust highlight M78 , one of the brightest reflection nebula on the sky. M78 is visible with a small telescope toward the…
The Local Interstellar Cloud
The stars are not alone. In the disk of our Milky Way Galaxy about 10 percent of visible matter is in the form of gas, called the interstellar medium (ISM). The ISM is not…
Moon Over Mongolia
Fighting clouds and the glow of city lights, a young Moon shines over the western horizon of Mongolia's capital, Ulaan-Baatar . The thin sunlit crescent is about 2 days old and…
PKS 1127-145: Quasar View
The quasar known as PKS 1127-145 lies ten billion light- years from our fair planet. A Hubble Space Telescope view in the left panel shows this quasar along with other galaxies as…
Coronal Hole
This ominous, dark shape sprawling across the face of the active Sun is a coronal hole -- a low density region extending above the surface where the solar magnetic field opens…
The Cosmic Infrared Background
What cosmic wallpaper is on the sky? The answer depends on the type of light considered, and for some wavelengths , all the cluttering material in the foreground makes it still…
Giant Storm Systems Battle on Jupiter
Two of the largest storm systems on Jupiter are colliding, and nobody is sure what will result. The larger storm is the famous Great Red Spot , while the smaller is a large white…
Comet LINEAR (WM1) Shines in the South
A new comet has brightened unexpectedly and is currently visible to unaided observers of southern skies. Comet C/2000 WM1 (LINEAR) is now reported by some observers to be at third…
The Coma Cluster of Galaxies
Almost every object in the above photograph is a galaxy. The Coma Cluster of Galaxies pictured above is one of the densest clusters known - it contains thousands of galaxies .…
Centaurus A: The Galaxy Deep Inside
Deep inside Centaurus A , the closest active galaxy to Earth, lies ... another galaxy! Cen A is a giant elliptical galaxy a mere 10 million light-years distant with a central…
Balloon TIGER
Where does a two-ton tiger hang out? Well, in this case the Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder ( TIGER ) experiment hangs from a mobile crane on the far left in this panorama…
EUVE Sky Map
The stars beyond the Sun and the distant galaxies should be undetectable at extreme ultraviolet wavelengths . At least that was the conventional wisdom when it was first realized…
Moonrise Over Seattle
Is the Moon larger when near the horizon? No -- as shown above, the Moon appears to be very nearly the same size no matter its location on the sky. Oddly, the cause or causes for…
The Southern Sky in Warm Hydrogen
A robotic telescope with red sunglasses in Chile has been photographing the entire southern sky for years. The result, shown above , is the most complete sky map of the most…
An Apollo 17 Panorama
What would it be like to stand on the surface of another world, to look all around you, and to try to figure out how this world got there? To get an idea, scroll right. In 1972…
Earth Rise
During 1968, the Apollo 8 crew flew from the Earth to the Moon and back. The crew, consisting of Frank Borman , James Lovell , and William Anders , were launched atop a Saturn V…
Shuttle Engine Blast
The Space Shuttle Discovery 's orbital maneuvering system (OMS) engine firing produced this dramatic flare as it cruised “upside down” in low Earth orbit. Discovery was named for…
The Spiral Arms of NGC 4622
While stirring a morning cup of coffee and thinking cosmic thoughts many astronomers would glance at this Hubble Space Telescope image of spiral galaxy NGC 4622 and assume that…
Ski Enceladus
A small inner moon of Saturn , Enceladus is only about 500 kilometers in diameter. But the cold, distant world does reflect over 90 percent of the sunlight it receives, giving its…
Local Group Galaxy NGC 6822
Nearby galaxy NGC 6822 is irregular in several ways. First, the galaxy's star distribution merits a formal classification of dwarf irregular , and from our vantage-point the small…
Neutron Bounce Quantized in Earth Gravity
For the first time, Earth's gravity has been used to isolate quantum energy levels of the neutron. The effect may be used in the future to test for slightly different effects of…
Volcano and Aurora in Iceland
Sometimes both heaven and Earth erupt. In Iceland in 1991, the volcano Hekla erupted at the same time that auroras were visible overhead. Hekla , one of the most famous volcanoes…
Viewing discoveries from 13 February 2002 through 21 January 2002.