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.
Cassini Flyby Shows Enceladus Venting
What's happening on the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus? Enormous ice jets are erupting. Giant plumes of ice have been photographed in dramatic fashion by the robotic Cassini…
Crescent Earth from the Departing Rosetta Spacecraft
Goodbye Earth. Earlier this month, ESA 's interplanetary Rosetta spacecraft zoomed past the Earth on its way back across the Solar System. Pictured above , Earth showed a bright…
Light Echoes from V838 Mon
What caused this outburst of V838 Mon? For reasons unknown , star V838 Mon 's outer surface suddenly greatly expanded with the result that it became the brightest star in the…
NGC 253: Dusty Island Universe
Shiny NGC 253 Galaxy, is one of the brightest spiral galaxies visible, and also one of the dustiest. Some call it the Silver Dollar Galaxy for its appearance in small telescopes,…
Meteor between the Clouds
This bright meteor streaked through dark night skies over Sutherland , South Africa on November 15. Potentially part of the annual Leonid meteor shower, its sudden, brilliant…
Leonid over Mono Lake
Eerie spires of rock rise from shore of Mono Lake in the foreground of this early morning skyscape. The salty, mineral-laden lake is located in California's eastern Sierra Nevada…
Water Discovered in Moon Shadow
Why is there water on the Moon? Last month, the LCROSS mission crashed a large impactor into a permanently shadowed crater near the Moon's South Pole. A plume of dust rose that…
Dawn Before Nova
Will this dawn bring another nova? Such dilemmas might be pondered one day by future humans living on a planet orbiting a cataclysmic variable binary star system. Cataclysmic…
M83's Center from Refurbished Hubble
What's happening at the center of spiral galaxy M83? Just about everything, from the looks of it. M83 is one of the closest spiral galaxies to our own Milky Way Galaxy and from a…
M57: The Ring Nebula
It looks like a ring on the sky. Hundreds of years ago astronomers noticed a nebula with a most unusual shape. Now known as M57 or NGC 6720, the gas cloud became popularly known…
DIA Sunrise
What's 93 million miles away and still hurts your eyes when you look at it? The answer is not the Denver International Airport, known to some travelers as DIA. But DIA does appear…
Young Stars in the Rho Ophiuchi Cloud
Cosmic dust clouds and embedded newborn stars glow at infrared wavelengths in this tantalizing false-color view from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Pictured is of one of the closest…
Art and Science in NGC 918
This beautiful telescopic skyscape features spiral galaxy NGC 918. The island universe is about 50,000 light-years across and lies some 60 million light-years away toward the…
Great Observatories Explore Galactic Center
Where can a telescope take you? Four hundred years ago, a telescope took Galileo to the Moon to discover craters, to Saturn to discover rings, to Jupiter to discover moons, to…
Saturn After Equinox
The other side of Saturn's ring plane is now directly illuminated by the Sun. For the previous 15 years, the southern side of Saturn and its rings were directly illuminated, but…
NGC 2623: Galaxy Merger from Hubble
Where do stars form when galaxies collide? To help find out, astronomers imaged the nearby galaxy merger NGC 2623 in high resolution with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2007.…
M7: Open Star Cluster in Scorpius
M7 is one of the most prominent open clusters of stars on the sky. The cluster, dominated by bright blue stars , can be seen with the naked eye in a dark sky in the tail of the…
Stickney Crater
Stickney Crater, the largest crater on the martian moon Phobos, is named for Chloe Angeline Stickney Hall, mathematician and wife of astronomer Asaph Hall. Asaph Hall discovered…
Ring Nebula Deep Field
A familiar sight to sky enthusiasts with even a small telescope, the Ring Nebula (M57) is some 2,000 light-years away in the musical constellation Lyra . The central ring is about…
Halloween's Moon
Illuminating the landscape all through the night of November 2nd, this week's bright Full Moon was known in the northern hemisphere as a Hunter's Moon . But this dramatic view of…
Blue Sun Bristling
Our Sun may look like all soft and fluffy, but it's not. Our Sun is an extremely large ball of bubbling hot gas , mostly hydrogen gas. The above picture of our Sun was taken last…
Seven Sisters Versus California
On the upper right, dressed in blue, is the Pleiades . Also known as the Seven Sisters and M45 , the Pleiades is one of the brightest and most easily visible open clusters on the…
Ares 1-X Rocket Lifts Off
Last week, NASA test fired a new rocket. The Ares 1 -X was the first non- shuttle rocket launched from Kennedy Space Center since the Saturn launched humans to Earth orbit and the…
The Average Color of the Universe
What color is the universe? More precisely, if the entire sky were smeared out, what color would the final mix be? This whimsical question came up when trying to determine what…
Viewing discoveries from 24 November 2009 through 1 November 2009.