Browse NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day archive by date and media: Archive Discoveries
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New Data: Ultima Thule Surprisingly Flat
Ultima Thule is not the object humanity thought that it was last month. When the robotic New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past the distant asteroid Ultima Thule (officially 2014…
Venus Unveiled
What does Venus look like beneath its thick clouds? These clouds keep the planet's surface hidden from even the powerful telescopic eyes of Earth-bound astronomers. In the early…
Comet Iwamoto and the Sombrero Galaxy
Comet Iwamoto (C/2018 Y1) , shows off a pretty, greenish coma at the upper left in this telescopic field of view. Taken on February 4 from the Mount John Observatory , University…
Moon, Four Planets, and Emu
A luminous Milky Way falls toward the horizon in this deep skyscape, starting at the top of the frame from the stars of the Southern Cross and the dark Coalsack Nebula. Captured…
Fox Fur, Unicorn, and Christmas Tree
Clouds of glowing hydrogen gas fill this colorful skyscape in the faint but fanciful constellation Monoceros , the Unicorn. A star forming region cataloged as NGC 2264 , the…
Moon and Venus Appulse over a Tree
What's that bright spot near the Moon? Venus . About a week ago, Earth's Moon appeared unusually close to the distant planet Venus, an angular coincidence known as an appulse .…
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…
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…
Viewing discoveries from 11 February 2019 through 17 January 2019.