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.
Aurora Shimmer, Meteor Flash
Northern Lights , or aurora borealis, haunted skies over the island of Kvaløya, near Tromsø Norway on 2009 December 13. This 30 second long exposure records their shimmering glow…
Orion Launch
Headed for two orbits of planet Earth and a splashdown in the Pacific, Orion blazed into the early morning sky on Friday at 7:05am ET. The spacecraft was launched atop a United…
Milky Way over Moon Valley
Our Milky Way Galaxy arcs over a desolate landscape in this fantastic panoramic night skyview . The otherworldly scene looks across the arid, eroded terrain of the Valle de la…
Plato and the Lunar Alps
The dark-floored, 95 kilometer wide crater Plato and sunlit peaks of the lunar Alps (Montes Alpes) are highlighted in this sharp digital snapshot of the Moon's surface . While the…
Sharpless 249 and the Jellyfish Nebula
Normally faint and elusive, the Jellyfish Nebula is caught in this alluring telescopic mosaic. The scene is anchored right and left by two bright stars, Mu and Eta Geminorum, at…
Eta Carinae and the Expanding Homunculus Nebula
How did the Eta Carinae star system create this unusual expanding nebula? No one knows for sure. About 170 years ago, the southern star system Eta Carinae (Eta Car) mysteriously…
Stars and Dust Pillars in NGC 7822 from WISE
Hot, young stars and cosmic pillars of gas and dust seem to crowd into NGC 7822. At the edge of a giant molecular cloud toward the northern constellation Cepheus , this glowing…
The Seahorse of the Large Magellanic Cloud
It may look like a grazing seahorse , but the dark object toward the image right is actually a pillar of smoky dust about 20 light years long. The curiously-shaped dust structure…
3D 67P
Get out your red/blue glasses and float next to a comet! The Rosetta mission lander Philae's ROLIS camera snapped the two frames used to create this stereo anaglyph for 3D viewing…
Portrait of NGC 281
Look through the cosmic cloud cataloged as NGC 281 and you might miss the stars of open cluster IC 1590 . But, formed within the nebula , that cluster's young, massive stars…
Galileo's Europa Remastered
Looping through the Jovian system in the late 1990s, the Galileo spacecraft recorded stunning views of Europa and uncovered evidence that the moon's icy surface likely hides a…
Io and Callisto Mutual Event
A 24 minute sequence from top to bottom, this intriguing series of telescopic frames tracks the occultation of Io by Callisto, two of Jupiter's Galilean moons , from San Pietro…
The Creature from the Red Lagoon
What creature lurks near the red Lagoon nebula? Mars. This gorgeous color deep-sky photograph has captured the red planet passing below two notable nebulae -- cataloged by the…
Soaring over Titan
What would it look like to fly over Titan? Radar images from NASA's robotic Cassini satellite in orbit around Saturn have been digitally compiled to simulate such a flight.…
Tornado and Rainbow Over Kansas
The scene might have been considered serene if it weren't for the tornado . During 2004 in Kansas , storm chaser Eric Nguyen photographed this budding twister in a different light…
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…
Viewing discoveries from 7 December 2014 through 14 November 2014.