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.
In the Heart of the Heart Nebula
What's that inside the Heart Nebula? First, the large emission nebula dubbed IC 1805 looks, in whole, like a human heart . It's shape perhaps fitting of the Valentine's Day , this…
Car Orbiting Earth
Last week, a car orbited the Earth. The car, created by humans and robots on the Earth, was launched by the SpaceX Company to demonstrate the ability of its Falcon Heavy Rocket to…
Blue Comet Meets Blue Stars
What's that heading for the Pleiades star cluster? It appears to be Comet C/2016 R2 (PanSTARRS) , but here, appearances are deceiving. On the right and far in the background , the…
A Partial Eclipse Over Manila Bay
What's happened to the setting Sun? An eclipse! In early 2009, the Moon eclipsed part of the Sun as visible from parts of Africa, Australia, and Asia . In particular the featured…
Roadster, Starman, Planet Earth
Don't panic . It's just a spacesuited mannequin named Starman . As the sunlit crescent of planet Earth recedes in the background, Starman is comfortably seated at the wheel of a…
Total Solar Lunar Eclipse
This digitally processed and composited picture creatively compares two famous eclipses in one; the total lunar eclipse (left) of January 31 , and the total solar eclipse of…
Bow Tie Moon and Star Trails
On January 31 , a leisurely lunar eclipse was enjoyed from all over the night side of planet Earth, the first of three consecutive total eclipses of the Moon . This dramatic…
NGC 7331 Close-Up
Big, beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 7331 is often touted as an analog to our own Milky Way . About 50 million light-years distant in the northern constellation Pegasus , NGC 7331 was…
Galaxy NGC 474: Shells and Star Streams
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…
NGC 7635: The Bubble Nebula Expanding
It's the bubble versus the cloud. NGC 7635, the Bubble Nebula , is being pushed out by the stellar wind of massive star BD+602522 , visible in blue toward the right, inside the…
Venus and the Triply Ultraviolet Sun
An unusual type of solar eclipse occurred in 2012. Usually it is the Earth's Moon that eclipses the Sun. That year, most unusually, the planet Venus took a turn. Like a solar…
Earthshadow and the Beehive
The Earth's dark umbral shadow is shaped like a cone extending into space . Of course its circular cross section at the distance of the Moon is more easily seen during a lunar…
Moonrise Eclipse
This atmospheric picture of a distant horizon looks toward the tall Trisul peaks of India's snowy Himalayan mountains. Taken from a remote location on January 31, bright star…
Moonset Eclipse
Near the closest point in its orbit, the second Full Moon of the month occurred on January 31. So did the first Total Lunar Eclipse of 2018, as the Moon slid through planet…
The First Explorer
Sixty years ago, on January 31, 1958, the First Explorer was successfully launched by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency on a Jupiter-C rocket. Inaugurating the era of space…
Venus at Night in Infrared from Akatsuki
Why is Venus so different from Earth? To help find out, Japan launched the robotic Akatsuki spacecraft which entered orbit around Venus late in 2015 after an unplanned five-year…
The Spider and The Fly
Will the spider ever catch the fly? Not if both are large emission nebulas toward the constellation of the Charioteer ( Auriga ). The spider -shaped gas cloud on the left is…
A Total Lunar Eclipse Over Tajikistan
If the full Moon suddenly faded, what would you see? The answer during the total lunar eclipse in 2011 was recorded in a dramatic time lapse video from Tajikistan. During a total…
Laguna Starry Sky
Staring toward the heavens , one of the many lagunas in the Atacama Desert salt flat calmly reflects a starry night sky near San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, planet Earth. Cosmic…
Selfie at Vera Rubin Ridge
On sol 1943 of its journey of exploration across the surface of Mars, the Curiosity Rover recorded this selfie at the south rim of Vera Rubin Ridge. Of course a sol is a Martian…
Cartwheel of Fortune
By chance, a collision of two galaxies has created a surprisingly recognizable shape on a cosmic scale, The Cartwheel Galaxy . The Cartwheel is part of a group of galaxies about…
The Tadpoles of IC 410
This telescopic close-up shows off the otherwise faint emission nebula IC 410. It also features two remarkable inhabitants of the cosmic pond of gas and dust below and left of…
Ribbons and Pearls of Spiral Galaxy NGC 1398
Why do some spiral galaxies have a ring around the center? Spiral galaxy NGC 1398 not only has a ring of pearly stars, gas and dust around its center, but a bar of stars and gas…
An Immersive Visualization of the Galactic Center
What if you could look out from the center of our Galaxy -- what might you see? Two scientifically-determined possibilities are shown in the featured video, an immersive…
Viewing discoveries from 14 February 2018 through 22 January 2018.