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.
Shuttle Reentry Streak from Orbit
What's that strange bright streak? It is the last image ever of a space shuttle from orbit. A week and a half ago, after decoupling from the International Space Station , the…
Metal on the Plains of Mars
What has the Opportunity rover found on Mars? While traversing a vast empty plain in 2005 in Meridiani Planum , one of Earth's rolling robots on Mars found a surprise when…
A Tale of Two Hemispheres
A quest to find planet Earth's darkest night skies led to this intriguing panorama. In projection, the mosaic view sandwiches the horizons visible in all-sky images taken from the…
Gale Crater
This sharp view from the Thermal Emission Imaging System camera on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter is centered on 154 kilometer (96 mile) wide Gale crater, near the martian equator.…
NGC 6188 and NGC 6164
Fantastic shapes lurk in clouds of glowing hydrogen gas in NGC 6188. The emission nebula is found near the edge of a large molecular cloud, unseen at visible wavelengths, in the…
Introducing Comet Garradd
Another large snowball is falling toward the Sun. Comet Garradd was discovered two years ago by Gordon Garradd in Australia , and is currently visible through a small telescope at…
Galaxy NGC 474: Cosmic Blender
What's happening to galaxy NGC 474? The multiple layers of emission appear strangely complex and unexpected given the relatively featureless appearance of the elliptical galaxy in…
Milky Way Over Abandoned Kilns
What's that below the Milky Way? Historic kilns . Built in the 1870s in rural Nevada , USA to process local wood into charcoal , the kilns were soon abandoned due to a town fire…
A Flight of Helios
An example of solar-powered flight, NASA's Helios aircraft flew almost one hundred years after the Wright brothers' historic flight on December 17, 1903. Pictured here at 3,000…
NGC 2403 in Camelopardalis
Magnificent island universe NGC 2403 stands within the boundaries of the long-necked constellation Camelopardalis . Some 10 million light-years distant and about 50,000…
Pluto's P4
Nix and Hydra were first introduced to human eyes in Hubble Space Telescope images from May 2005 , as Pluto's second and third known moons. Now Hubble images have revealed a…
Atlantis Farewell from Parkes
The Parkes 64 meter radio telescope is known for its contribution to human spaceflight, famously supplying television images from the Moon to denizens of planet Earth during…
Noctilucent Clouds Over Edmonton
Sometimes it's night on the ground but day in the air. As the Earth rotates to eclipse the Sun, sunset rises up from the ground. Therefore, at sunset on the ground, sunlight still…
Vesta Vista
What does the surface of asteroid Vesta look like? The brightest asteroid in the Solar System and the object which takes up about 10 percent of the entire mass of the main…
A Busy Space Walk at the Space Station
What's that astronaut doing? Unloading a space shuttle -- for the last time. After the space shuttle Atlantis docked with the International Space Station (ISS) last week,…
Lewin's Challenge: 360 Degree Star Trails
You could be the first person ever to take a real single-exposure image like this. The above image from Vienna, Austria is not real in the sense that the 360 degree star trails in…
Starry Night over Dubai
A starry night over the city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates is really not so starry . In fact, the Moon is the only celestial beacon to come close to competing with city…
NGC 3314: When Galaxies Overlap
NGC 3314 is actually two large spiral galaxies which just happen to almost exactly line up. The foreground spiral is viewed nearly face-on , its pinwheel shape defined by young…
Neptune: Once Around
Neptune rotates once on its axis in about 16 hours. So, spaced about 4 hours apart these 4 images of the solar system's most distant gas giant cover one Neptune day. Recorded by…
Atlantis' Last Approach
For the last time, the US Space Shuttle has approached the International Space Station (ISS). Following a dramatic launch from Cape Canaveral last week that was witnessed by an…
The Perseus Cluster of Galaxies
Here is one of the largest objects that anyone will ever see on the sky. Each of these fuzzy blobs is a galaxy, together making up the Perseus Cluster , one of the closest…
A Total Lunar Eclipse Over Tajikistan
If the full Moon suddenly faded, what would you see? The answer during the total lunar eclipse last month was recorded in a dramatic time lapse video from Tajikistan. During a…
A Milky Way Band
Most bright stars in our Milky Way Galaxy reside in a disk. Since our Sun also resides in this disk, these stars appear to us as a diffuse band that circles the sky. The above…
Atlantis Reflection
Space shuttle orbiter Atlantis left planet Earth on Friday, July 8, embarking on the STS-135 mission to the International Space Station. The momentous launch was the final one in…
Viewing discoveries from 1 August 2011 through 9 July 2011.