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.
Iridescent Cloud Edge Over Colorado
Sometimes your eclipse viewing goes bad in an interesting way. While watching and photographing last Thursday 's partial solar eclipse , a popular astronomy blogger suffered…
Retrograde Mars
Why would Mars appear to move backwards? Most of the time, the apparent motion of Mars in Earth's sky is in one direction, slow but steady in front of the far distant stars. About…
Plane, Clouds, Moon, Spots, Sun
What's that in front of the Sun? The closest object is an airplane , visible just below the Sun's center and caught purely by chance. Next out are numerous clouds in Earth's…
Too Close to a Black Hole
What would you see if you went right up to a black hole? Featured is a computer generated image highlighting how strange things would look. The black hole has such strong gravity…
Sunspots and Solar Eclipse
A New Moon joined giant sunspot group AR 2192 to dim the bright solar disk during Thursday's much anticipated partial solar eclipse. Visible from much of North America, the Moon's…
AR 2192: Giant on the Sun
As you (safely!) watched the progress of yesterday's partial solar eclipse, you probably also spotted a giant sunspot group . Captured in this sharp telescopic image from October…
Galaxies in Pegasus
This wide, sharp telescopic view reveals galaxies scattered beyond the stars and faint dust nebulae of the Milky Way at the northern boundary of the high-flying constellation…
Sunspot Group AR 2192 Crackles
One of the largest sunspot groups in recent years is now crossing the Sun. Labelled Active Region 2192, it has already thrown a powerful solar flare and has the potential to…
Mimas: Small Moon with a Big Crater
Whatever hit Mimas nearly destroyed it. What remains is one of the largest impact craters on one of Saturn 's smallest moons. The crater, named Herschel after the 1789 discoverer…
Comet Siding Spring Passes Mars
Yesterday, a comet passed very close to Mars. In fact, Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) passed closer to the red planet than any comet has ever passed to Earth in recorded history.…
Comet McNaught Over New Zealand
Comet McNaught was perhaps the most photogenic comet of modern times -- from Earth. After making quite a show in the northern hemisphere in early January of 2007, the comet moved…
Melotte 15 in the Heart
Cosmic clouds form fantastic shapes in the central regions of emission nebula IC 1805. The clouds are sculpted by stellar winds and radiation from massive hot stars in the…
Messier 6 and Comet Siding Spring
This looks like a near miss but the greenish coma and tail of Comet Siding Spring (C/2013 A1) are really 2,000 light-years or so away from the stars of open cluster Messier 6 .…
Rosetta's Selfie
This Rosetta spacecraft selfie was snapped on October 7th. At the time the spacecraft was about 472 million kilometers from planet Earth , but only 16 kilometers from the surface…
Mysterious Changing feature on Titan
What is that changing object in a cold hydrocarbon sea of Titan? Radar images from the robotic Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn have been recording the surface of the…
Auroral Corona over Norway
Higher than the highest mountain lies the realm of the aurora. Auroras rarely reach below 60 kilometers, and can range up to 1000 kilometers. Aurora light results from energetic…
Sprite Lightning in Slow Motion
What causes sprite lightning? Mysterious bursts of light in the sky that momentarily resemble gigantic jellyfish have been recorded for over 25 years, but their root cause remains…
The Helix Nebula from Blanco and Hubble
How did a star create the Helix nebula ? The shapes of planetary nebula like the Helix are important because they likely hold clues to how stars like the Sun end their lives.…
Eclipse at Moonrise
As the Moon rose and the Sun set on October 8, a lunar eclipse was in progress seen from Chongqing, China . Trailing through this composite time exposure , the rising Moon began…
Moons at Opposition
From the early hours of October 8, over the Santa Cruz Mountains near Los Gatos, California, the totally eclipsed Moon shows a range of color across this well-exposed telescopic…
Eclipse at Moonset
The Pacific Ocean and Chilean coast lie below this sea of clouds. Seen through the subtle colors of the predawn sky a lunar eclipse is in progress above, the partially eclipsed…
NGC 6823: Cloud Sculpting Star Cluster
Star cluster NGC 6823 is slowly turning gas clouds into stars. The center of the open cluster, visible on the upper right, formed only about two million years ago and is dominated…
From the Temple of the Sun to the Temple of the Moon
What connects the Sun to the Moon? Many answers have been given throughout history , but in the case of today's featured image, it appears to be the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy…
Space Station Detector Finds Unexplained Positron Excess
Where did all these high energy positrons come from? The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) onboard the International Space Station (ISS) has been meticulously recording how…
Viewing discoveries from 29 October 2014 through 6 October 2014.