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.
Moon and Planets at Twilight
This week's ongoing conjunction of Venus and Jupiter may have whetted your appetite for skygazing. Tonight is the main course though. On November 28, a young crescent Moon will…
Hoag's Object: A Nearly Perfect Ring Galaxy
Is this one galaxy or two? This question came to light in 1950 when astronomer Arthur Hoag chanced upon this unusual extragalactic object. On the outside is a ring dominated by…
Venus and Jupiter on the Horizon
What are those two bright objects on the horizon? Venus and Jupiter . The two brightest planets in the night sky passed very close together -- angularly -- just two days ago. In…
NGC 6995: The Bat Nebula
Do you see the bat? It haunts this cosmic close-up of the eastern Veil Nebula . The Veil Nebula itself is a large supernova remnant, the expanding debris cloud from the death…
Apollo 12: Self-Portrait
Is this image art? 50 years ago, Apollo 12 astronaut-photographer Charles “Pete” Conrad recorded this masterpiece while documenting colleague Alan Bean 's lunar soil collection…
Apollo 12 and Surveyor 3 Stereo View
Put on your red/blue glasses and gaze across the western Ocean of Storms on the surface of the Moon. The 3D view features Apollo 12 astronaut Pete Conrad visiting the Surveyor 3…
Orion Rising
Looking toward the east in the early hours of a September morning this single exposure made with tripod and camera captured a simple visual experience. Rising above the tree-lined…
Simeis 147: Supernova Remnant
It's easy to get lost following the intricate looping filaments in this detailed image of supernova remnant Simeis 147. Also cataloged as Sharpless 2-240 it goes by the popular…
Arp 273: Battling Galaxies from Hubble
What's happening to these spiral galaxies? Although details remain uncertain , there sure seems to be a titanic battle going on. The upper galaxy is labelled UGC 1810 by itself,…
Milky Way over Uruguayan Lighthouse
Can a lighthouse illuminate a galaxy? No, but in the featured image, gaps in light emanating from the Jose Ignacio Lighthouse in Uruguay appear to match up nicely, although only…
Young Stars in the Rho Ophiuchi Cloud
How do stars form? To help find out, astronomers created this tantalizing false-color composition of dust clouds and embedded newborn stars in infrared wavelengths with WISE, the…
The Star Streams of NGC 5907
Grand tidal streams of stars seem to surround galaxy NGC 5907 . The arcing structures form tenuous loops extending more than 150,000 light-years from the narrow, edge-on spiral,…
M16 and the Eagle Nebula
A star cluster around 2 million years young surrounded by natal clouds of dust and glowing gas, M16 is also known as The Eagle Nebula. This beautifully detailed portrait of the…
Mercury and the Quiet Sun
On November 11, 2019 the Sun was mostly quiet, experiencing a minimum in its 11 year cycle of activity . In fact, the only spot visible was actually planet Mercury, making a…
Mercury in Silhouette
The small, dark, round spot in this solar close up is planet Mercury. In the high resolution telescopic image, a colorized stack of 61 sharp video frames, a turbulent array of…
NGC 3717: A Nearly Sideways Spiral Galaxy
Some spiral galaxies are seen nearly sideways. Most bright stars in spiral galaxies swirl around the center in a disk, and seen from the side, this disk can appear quite thin.…
Lunar Craters Langrenus and Petavius
The history of the Moon is partly written in its craters. Pictured here is a lunar panorama taken from Earth featuring the large craters Langrenus , toward the left, and Petavius…
A Mercury Transit Sequence
Tomorrow -- Monday -- Mercury will cross the face of the Sun , as seen from Earth. Called a transit , the last time this happened was in 2016 . Because the plane of Mercury's…
Saturn the Giant
On May 25, 1961 U.S. president John Kennedy announced the goal of landing astronauts on the Moon by the end of the decade. By November 9, 1967 this Saturn V rocket was ready for…
NGC 3572 and the Southern Tadpoles
This cosmic skyscape features glowing gas and dark dust clouds along side the young stars of NGC 3572 . A beautiful emission nebula and star cluster in far southern skies, the…
Messier 45: The Daughters of Atlas and Pleione
Hurtling through a cosmic dust cloud a mere 400 light-years away, the lovely Pleiades or Seven Sisters open star cluster is well-known for its striking blue reflection nebulae .…
21st Century M101
One of the last entries in Charles Messier's famous catalog, big, beautiful spiral galaxy M101 is definitely not one of the least. About 170,000 light-years across, this galaxy is…
Spiral Galaxies Spinning Super-Fast
Why are these galaxies spinning so fast? If you estimated each spiral 's mass by how much light it emits, their fast rotations should break them apart. The leading hypothesis as…
Near the Center of the Lagoon Nebula
Stars are battling gas and dust in the Lagoon Nebula but the photographer s are winning. Also known as M8, this photogenic nebula is visible even without binoculars towards the…
Viewing discoveries from 28 November 2019 through 4 November 2019.