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.
Lunar Eclipses
The dark, inner shadow of planet Earth is called the umbra . Shaped like a cone extending into space, it has a circular cross section and is most easily seen during a lunar…
X-rays from Supernova Remnant SN 1006
What looks like a puff-ball is surely the remains of the brightest supernova in recorded human history. In 1006 AD , it was recorded as lighting up the nighttime skies above areas…
The Horsehead Nebula in Infrared from Hubble
While drifting through the cosmos, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud became sculpted by stellar winds and radiation to assume a recognizable shape. Fittingly named the…
The Big Dipper
Do you see it? This common question frequently precedes the rediscovery of one of the most commonly recognized configurations of stars on the northern sky: the Big Dipper . This…
Airglow, Gegenschein, and Milky Way
As far as the eye could see , it was a dark night at Las Campanas Observatory in the southern Atacama desert of Chile. But near local midnight on April 11, this mosaic of 3 minute…
NGC 1788 and the Witch's Whiskers
This skyscape finds an esthetic balance of interstellar dust and gas residing in the suburbs of the nebula rich constellation of Orion. Reflecting the light of bright star Rigel,…
Star Factory Messier 17
Sculpted by stellar winds and radiation, the star factory known as Messier 17 lies some 5,500 light-years away in the nebula-rich constellation Sagittarius . At that distance,…
Mt. Hood and a Lenticular Cloud
What kind of cloud is next to that mountain? A lenticular . This type of cloud forms in air that passes over a mountain, rises up again, and cools past the dew point -- so what…
Grand Spiral Galaxy M81 and Arp's Loop
One of the brightest galaxies in planet Earth's sky is similar in size to our Milky Way Galaxy: big, beautiful M81 . This grand spiral galaxy lies 11.8 million light-years away…
IC 1848: The Soul Nebula
Stars are forming in the Soul of the Queen of Aethopia. More specifically, a large star forming region called the Soul Nebula can be found in the direction of the constellation…
Crescent Neptune and Triton
Gliding silently through the outer Solar System , the Voyager 2 spacecraft camera captured Neptune and Triton together in crescent phase in 1989. The elegant picture of the gas…
Sun with Solar Flare
This week the Sun gave up its strongest solar flare so far in 2013, accompanied by a coronal mass ejection (CME) headed toward planet Earth. A false-color composite image in…
Yuri's Planet
On another April 12th , in 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alexseyevich Gagarin became the first human to see planet Earth from space. Commenting on his view from orbit he reported,…
Darkened City
In a haunting vista you can never see, bright stars and the central Milky Way rise over the dark skyline of metropolitan Pudong in Shanghai, China. Looking east across the Huangpu…
Space Station Lookout
If you glanced out a side window of the International Space Station, what might you see? If you were Expedition 34 flight engineer Chris Hadfield , and you were looking out one of…
NGC 3132: The Southern Ring Nebula
It's the dim star, not the bright one, near the center of NGC 3132 that created this odd but beautiful planetary nebula . Nicknamed the Eight-Burst Nebula and the Southern Ring…
A Redshift Lookup Table for our Universe
How far away is “redshift six”? Although humans are inherently familiar with distance and time , what is actually measured for astronomical objects is redshift , a color…
The Moon's Saturn
Just days after sharing the western evening sky with Venus in 2007, the Moon moved on to Saturn - actually passing in front of the ringed planet Saturn when viewed in skies over…
Earth at Twilight
No sudden, sharp boundary marks the passage of day into night in this gorgeous view of ocean and clouds over our fair planet Earth . Instead, the shadow line or terminator is…
Comet of the North
It looks like a double comet, but Comet PanSTARRS (C/2011 L4) is just offering skygazers a Messier moment . Outward bound and fading in this starry scene , the well-photographed…
M64: The Black Eye Galaxy
This beautiful, bright, spiral galaxy is Messier 64 , often called the Black Eye Galaxy or the Sleeping Beauty Galaxy for its heavy-lidded appearance in telescopic views. M64 is…
Comet PANSTARRS and the Andromeda Galaxy
Currently, comet PANSTARRS is passing nearly in front of the galaxy Andromeda. Coincidentally, both comet and galaxy appear now to be just about the same angular size . In…
IC 4592: The Blue Horsehead Reflection Nebula
Do you see the horse's head? What you are seeing is not the famous Horsehead nebula toward Orion but rather a fainter nebula that only takes on a familiar form with deeper…
The Whole Quiz:
Which is which? Of the two images shown above, one is a moon in our Solar System, while the other is the bottom of frying pan . We are not making this up -- can you tell a pan…
Viewing discoveries from 25 April 2013 through 1 April 2013.