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.
A Hotspot Map of Neutron Star J0030's Surface
What do neutron stars look like? Previously these city-sized stars were too small and too far away to resolve. Recently, however, the first maps of the locations and sizes of…
The Horsehead Nebula
Sculpted by stellar winds and radiation, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud by chance has assumed this recognizable shape . Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula , it is some…
The Magnetic Fields of Spiral Galaxy M77
Can magnetic fields help tell us how spiral galaxies form and evolve? To find out, the HAWC+ instrument on NASA's airborne ( 747 ) SOFIA observatory observed nearby spiral galaxy…
Mammatus Clouds over Nebraska
When do cloud bottoms appear like bubbles? Normally, cloud bottoms are flat . This is because moist warm air that rises and cools will condense into water droplets at a specific…
Interstellar Comet 2I/Borisov
From somewhere else in the Milky Way galaxy, Comet 2I/Borisov is just visiting the Solar System. Discovered by Crimean amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov on August 30, 2019, the…
Full Moon Geminids
The dependable annual Geminid meteor shower will be near its peak tonight (December 13/14) and before tomorrow's dawn. As Earth crosses through the dusty trail of active asteroid…
Decorating the Sky
Bright stars, clouds of dust and glowing nebulae decorate this cosmic scene, a skyscape just north of Orion's belt . Close to the plane of our Milky Way galaxy, the wide field…
N63A: Supernova Remnant in Visible and X-ray
What has this supernova left behind? As little as 2,000 years ago, light from a massive stellar explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) first reached planet Earth. The LMC…
Starlink Satellite Trails over Brazil
What are those streaks over the horizon? New Starlink satellites reflecting sunlight. SpaceX launched 60 Starlink communication satellites in May and 60 more in November . These…
Looking Sideways from the Parker Solar Probe
Everybody sees the Sun. Nobody's been there. Starting in 2018 though, NASA launched the robotic Parker Solar Probe (PSP) to investigate regions near to the Sun for the first time.…
Geminid Meteors over Chile
Are meteors streaming out from a point in the sky? Yes, in a way. When the Earth crosses a stream of Sun-orbiting meteors , these meteors appear to come from the direction of the…
Lines of Time
In time stars trace lines through the night sky on a rotating planet . Taken over two hours or more, these digitally added consecutive exposures were made with a camera and wide…
Pleiades to Hyades
This cosmic vista stretches almost 20 degrees from top to bottom, across the dusty constellation Taurus . It begins at the Pleiades and ends at the Hyades, two star clusters…
Spiral Galaxy NGC 6744
Beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 6744 is nearly 175,000 light-years across, larger than our own Milky Way . It lies some 30 million light-years distant in the southern constellation…
Electric Night
It may appear, at first, like the Galaxy is producing the lightning, but really it's the Earth. The featured nighttime landscape was taken from a southern tip of the Italian…
M27: The Dumbbell Nebula
Is this what will become of our Sun? Quite possibly. The first hint of our Sun 's future was discovered inadvertently in 1764 . At that time, Charles Messier was compiling a list…
Mercury Crosses a Quiet Sun
What's that black dot crossing the Sun? The planet Mercury. Mercury usually passes over or under the Sun, as seen from Earth, but last month the Solar System's innermost planet…
Starburst Galaxy M94 from Hubble
Why does this galaxy have a ring of bright blue stars? Beautiful island universe Messier 94 lies a mere 15 million light-years distant in the northern constellation of the Hunting…
Star Trails for a Red Planet
Does Mars have a north star ? In long exposures of Earth's night sky , star trails make concentric arcs around the north celestial pole, the direction of our fair planet's axis of…
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…
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…
Viewing discoveries from 18 December 2019 through 25 November 2019.