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.
Gravity Probe B Confirms the Existence of Gravitomagnetism
Does gravity have a magnetic counterpart? Spin any electric charge and you get a magnetic field. Spin any mass and, according to Einstein, you should get a very slight effect that…
Wonder and Mystery above the Very Large Telescopes
What's that bright orange dot above the large telescope on the right? Even seasoned sky enthusiasts might ponder the origin of the orange orb seen by scrolling across this…
Shadow of a Martian Robot
What if you saw your shadow on Mars and it wasn't human ? Then you might be the Opportunity rover currently exploring Mars. Opportunity and sister robot Spirit have been probing…
Dawn of the Planets
This month, four of the five naked-eye planets gather along the eastern horizon near dawn. The celestial grouping is seen here just before sunrise on May 5, from a beach near…
Farther Along
What is humanity's most distant spacecraft? Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 now holds that distinction at 17.5 billion kilometers from the Sun. That corresponds to 16 light-hours or…
50 Years Ago: Freedom 7 Flies
Fifty years ago, near the dawn of the space age , NASA controllers “lit the candle” and sent Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard arcing into space atop a Redstone rocket . His cramped…
Celestial Trails over Greece
If you watch the horizon at just the right place and at just the right time, you can witness some spectacular juxtapositions between Earth and sky. In the above video, stars, the…
Globular Cluster M15 from Hubble
Stars, like bees, swarm around the center of bright globular cluster M15. This ball of over 100,000 stars is a relic from the early years of our Galaxy , and continues to orbit…
Jupiter's Great Red Spot from Voyager 1
It is a hurricane twice the size of the Earth. It has been raging at least as long as telescopes could see it, and shows no signs of slowing. It is Jupiter's Great Red Spot , the…
Molecular Cloud Barnard 163
It may look to some like a duck, but it lays stars instead of eggs. In the center of the above image lies Barnard 163, a nebula of molecular gas and dust so thick that visible…
Tycho's Supernova Remnant
Tycho! Tycho! burning bright In the darkness of the night, What exploding white dwarf star Did frame thy remnant from afar, In the distant deep dark skies Under gaze of human…
The Antennae
Some 60 million light-years away in the southerly constellation Corvus , two large galaxies collided . But the stars in the two galaxies, cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039 ,…
Scintillating
On June 4, 2010 Regulus, alpha star of the constellation Leo, and wandering planet Mars were at about the same apparent brightness, separated on the sky by 1.5 degrees. An…
The Dark Tower in Scorpius
In silhouette against a crowded star field toward the constellation Scorpius , this dusty cosmic cloud evokes for some the image of an ominous dark tower . In fact, clumps of dust…
Hydrogen in the LMC
A satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is an alluring sight in dark southern skies and the constellation Dorado . A mere 180,000 light-years…
Monsters of IC 1396
Is there a monster in IC 1396 ? Known to some as the Elephant's Trunk Nebula, parts of the glowing gas and dust clouds of this star formation region may appear to take on…
The Cat's Eye Nebula from Hubble
Staring across interstellar space, the alluring Cat's Eye nebula lies three thousand light-years from Earth. A classic planetary nebula , the Cat's Eye (NGC 6543) represents a…
Shadows at the Lunar South Pole
What is it? It's a multi-temporal illumination map , of course. To make it, the wide angle camera on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft collected 1,700 images over a…
Virgo Cluster Galaxies
Well over a thousand galaxies are known members of the Virgo Cluster , the closest large cluster of galaxies to our own local group . In fact, the galaxy cluster is difficult to…
Peculiar Galaxies of Arp 273
The spiky stars in the foreground of this sharp cosmic portrait are well within our own Milky Way Galaxy . The two eye-catching galaxies lie far beyond the Milky Way , at a…
Rio Morning Moonset
As the Sun rose , a nearly full Moon set in this serene seaside vista captured last Monday from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In the foreground, the reddened early morning sunlight…
The GRB 110328A Symphony
A symphony of planet-wide observations began abruptly on March 28 when the Earth-orbiting Swift satellite detected a burst of high-frequency gamma-rays from GRB 110328A. When the…
Visual Effects: Wonders of the Universe
What visual effects are depicted in this video? The effects were created by BDH for the BBC television show Wonders of the Universe, but are unlabeled in this version. Even so,…
View from Everest
What would it be like to stand atop the tallest mountain on Earth? To see a full panoramic vista from there, scroll right. Visible are snow peaked mountains near and far,…
Viewing discoveries from 10 May 2011 through 17 April 2011.