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.
Perijove 16: Passing Jupiter
Watch Juno zoom past Jupiter again. NASA's robotic spacecraft Juno is continuing on its 53-day, highly-elongated orbits around our Solar System's largest planet. The featured…
Henize 70: A Superbubble in the LMC
Massive stars profoundly affect their galactic environments. Churning and mixing interstellar clouds of gas and dust, stars -- most notably those upwards of tens of times the mass…
An Airglow Fan from Lake to Sky
Why would the sky look like a giant fan? Airglow . The featured intermittent green glow appeared to rise from a lake through the arch of our Milky Way Galaxy , as captured during…
LDN 1622: Dark Nebula in Orion
The silhouette of an intriguing dark nebula inhabits this cosmic scene. Lynds' Dark Nebula ( LDN ) 1622 appears against a faint background of glowing hydrogen gas only easily seen…
Twin Galaxies in Virgo
Spiral galaxy pair NGC 4567 and NGC 4568 share this sharp cosmic vista with lonely elliptical galaxy NGC 4564. All are members of the large Virgo Galaxy Cluster . With their…
Sharpless 308: Star Bubble
Blown by fast winds from a hot, massive star, this cosmic bubble is huge. Cataloged as Sharpless 2-308 it lies some 5,200 light-years away toward the constellation of the Big Dog…
Wide Field View of Great American Eclipse
Only in the fleeting darkness of a total solar eclipse is the light of the solar corona easily visible. Normally overwhelmed by the bright solar disk, the expansive corona , the…
Ultima Thule from New Horizons
How do distant asteroids differ from those near the Sun? To help find out, NASA sent the robotic New Horizons spacecraft past the classical Kuiper belt object 2014 MU69 ,…
The Long Gas Tail of Spiral Galaxy D100
Why is there long red streak attached to this galaxy? The streak is made mostly of glowing hydrogen that has been systematically stripped away as the galaxy moved through the…
From the Northern to the Southern Cross
There is a road that connects the Northern to the Southern Cross but you have to be at the right place and time to see it. The road, as pictured here, is actually the central band…
The Umbra of Earth
The dark, inner shadow of planet Earth is called the umbra . Shaped like a cone extending into space, it has a circular cross section most easily seen during a lunar eclipse . For…
Moon Struck
Craters produced by ancient impacts on the airless Moon have long been a familiar sight. But only since the 1990s have observers began to regularly record and study optical…
Matterhorn, Moon, and Meteor
Fans of planet Earth probably recognize the Matterhorn in the foreground of this night skyscape. Famed in mountaineering history , the 4,478 meter Alpine mountain stands next to…
Orion over the Austrian Alps
Do you recognize this constellation? Through the icicles and past the mountains is Orion , one of the most identifiable star groupings on the sky and an icon familiar to humanity…
Lunar Eclipse over Cologne Cathedral
Why would a bright full Moon suddenly become dark? Because it entered the shadow of the Earth . That's what happened Sunday night as the Moon underwent a total lunar eclipse .…
InSight Lander Takes Selfie on Mars
This is what NASA's Insight lander looks like on Mars. With its solar panels , InSight is about the size of a small bus. Insight successfully landed on Mars in November with a…
A Total Lunar Eclipse Video
Tonight a bright full Moon will fade to red. Tonight's moon will be particularly bright because it is reaching its fully lit phase when it is relatively close to the Earth in its…
Total Lunar Eclipse at Moonset
The Moon slid through Earth's shadow on January 31, 2018 in a total lunar eclipse . In this time-lapse sequence of that eclipse from Portal, Arizona, USA, the partial eclipse…
Circumpolar Star Trails
As Earth spins on its axis, the stars appear to rotate around an observatory in this well-composed image from the Canary Island of Tenerife. Of course, the colorful concentric…
Cabin under the Stars
Gocka's, a family nickname for the mountain cabin, and a wooden sled from a generation past stand quietly under the stars. The single exposure image was taken on January 6 from…
IC 342: The Hidden Galaxy
Similar in size to large, bright spiral galaxies in our neighborhood, IC 342 is a mere 10 million light-years distant in the long-necked, northern constellation Camelopardalis . A…
The Heart and Soul Nebulas
Is the heart and soul of our Galaxy located in Cassiopeia ? Possibly not, but that is where two bright emission nebulas nicknamed Heart and Soul can be found. The Heart Nebula ,…
Meteor and Milky Way over the Alps
Now this was a view with a thrill. From Mount Tschirgant in the Alps , you can see not only nearby towns and distant Tyrol ean peaks, but also, weather permitting, stars, nebulas,…
Tycho's Supernova Remnant in X-ray
What star created this huge puffball? What's pictured is the hot expanding nebula of Tycho's supernova remnant , the result of a stellar explosion first recorded over 400 years…
Viewing discoveries from 5 February 2019 through 13 January 2019.