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.
Solar Flare from a Sharper Sun
Solar active region AR2192 was the largest recorded sunspot group of the last 24 years. Before rotating off the Earth-facing side of the Sun at the end of October, it produced a…
M1: The Crab Nebula
The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first object on Charles Messier's famous 18th century list of things which are not comets. In fact, the Crab is now known to be a supernova…
LDN 988: Dark Nebula in Cygnus
Obscuring the rich starfields of northern Cygnus, dark nebula LDN 988 lies near the center of this cosmic skyscape . Composed with telescope and camera, the scene is some 2…
Bright Spiral Galaxy M81
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 can be found toward the northern…
Star Formation in the Tadpole Nebula
Dusty emission in the Tadpole nebula, IC 410, lies about 12,000 light-years away in the northern constellation Auriga . The cloud of glowing gas is over 100 light-years across,…
The Double Dust Disks of HD 95086
What do other star systems look like? To help find out, astronomers are carrying out detailed observations of nearby stars in infrared light to see which have dust disks that…
Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita
Leonids Meteor Shower came to an impressive crescendo in 1999. Observers in Europe saw a sharp peak in the number of meteors visible around 0210 UTC during the early morning hours…
The Tulip Nebula
Framing a bright emission region this telescopic view looks out along the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy toward the nebula rich constellation Cygnus the Swan . Popularly called the…
Welcome to a Comet
The Rosetta Mission lander is safely on a comet. One of Philae's feet appears at the bottom left of this spectacular image of the surface of C67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Still a…
Descent to a Comet
Yesterday, the first soft landing on a comet took place some 500 million kilometers from planet Earth as the Rosetta mission lander Philae settled on the nucleus of C67/P…
Philae Attempts Comet Nucleus Landing
Today humanity will make its first attempt to land a probe on the nucleus of a comet. As the day progresses, the Philae (fee-LAY) lander will separate from the Rosetta spacecraft…
Orion in Gas, Dust, and Stars
The constellation of Orion holds much more than three stars in a row. A deep exposure shows everything from dark nebulae to star clusters, all embedded in an extended patch of…
The Protoplanetary Disk of HL Tauri from ALMA
Why does this giant disk have gaps? The exciting and probable answer is: planets. A mystery is how planets massive enough to create these gaps formed so quickly, since the HL…
The Cat's Eye Nebula from Hubble
To some, it may look like a cat's eye. The alluring Cat's Eye nebula, however, lies three thousand light-years from Earth across interstellar space. A classic planetary nebula ,…
Polar Ring Galaxy NGC 660
NGC 660 is featured in this cosmic snapshot , a sharp composite of broad and narrow band filter image data from the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea . Over 20 million…
The Map of Dione
This cylindrical projection global map is one of six new color maps of Saturn's midsized icy moons, constructed using 10 years of image data from the Cassini spacecraft .…
Sh2-155: The Cave Nebula
This colorful skyscape features the dusty Sharpless catalog emission region Sh2-155 , the Cave Nebula. In the composite image, data taken through narrowband filters tracks the…
NGC 4762: A Galaxy on the Edge
Why is there a bright line on the sky? What is pictured above is actually a disk galaxy being seen almost perfectly edge on. The image from the Hubble Space Telescope is a…
Moon and Earth from Chang'e 5-T1
Described at times as a big blue marble , from some vantage points Earth looks more like a small blue marble. Such was the case in this iconic image of the Earth and Moon system…
In Green Company: Aurora over Norway
Raise your arms if you see an aurora. With those instructions, two nights went by with, well, clouds -- mostly. On the third night of returning to same peaks, though, the sky not…
Titan Beyond the Rings
When orbiting Saturn, be sure to watch for breathtaking superpositions of moons and rings. One such picturesque vista was visible recently to the robot Cassini spacecraft now…
The Day After Mars
October 31, 1938 was the day after Martians encountered planet Earth, and everything was calm. Reports of the invasion were revealed to be part of a Halloween radio drama, the now…
Milky Way over Devils Tower
A mysterious formation known as Devils Tower rises into the dark above northeastern Wyoming's prairie landscape in this 16 frame panoramic view. Seen against the night sky's thin,…
A Spectre in the Eastern Veil
Frightening forms and scary faces are a mark of the Halloween season. They also haunt this cosmic close-up of the eastern Veil Nebula. The Veil Nebula itself is a large supernova…
Viewing discoveries from 22 November 2014 through 30 October 2014.