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.
Cassini Spacecraft Crosses Saturn's Ring Plane
If this is Saturn, where are the rings? When Saturn's “appendages” disappeared in 1612, Galileo did not understand why. Later that century, it became understood that Saturn 's…
A Distorted Sunrise Eclipse
Yes, but have you ever seen a sunrise like this? Here, after initial cloudiness, the Sun appeared to rise in two pieces and during partial eclipse, causing the photographer to…
A Partial Solar Eclipse Sequence Reflected
What's happened to the Sun? Yesterday, if you were in the right place at the right time, you could see the Sun rise partially eclipsed by the Moon . The unusual sight was captured…
The Northern Winter Hexagon
December's New Moon brought a solar eclipse to some for the holiday season. It also gave beautiful dark night skies to skygazers around the globe, like this moonless northern…
An Annular Solar Eclipse over New Mexico
What is this person doing? In 2012 an annular eclipse of the Sun was visible over a narrow path that crossed the northern Pacific Ocean and several western US states. In an…
A Northern Winter Sky Panorama
What stars shine in Earth's northern hemisphere during winter? The featured image highlights a number of bright stars visible earlier this month. The image is a 360-degree…
Places for OSIRIS-REx to Touch Asteroid Bennu
Where is the best place to collect a surface sample from asteroid Bennu? Launched in 2016, NASA sent the robotic Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification,…
Solstice Illuminated: A Year of Sky
Can you find which day is the winter solstice? Each panel shows one day. With 360 movie panels, the sky over (almost) an entire year is shown in time lapse format as recorded by a…
Solstice to Solstice Solargraph Timelapse
The 2019 December Solstice , on the first day of winter in planet Earth's northern hemisphere and summer in the south, is at 4:19 Universal Time December 22. That's December 21…
Late Afternoon on Mars
Shadows grow long near sunset in this wide panoramic view from the Curiosity rover on Mars . Made with Curiosity's navcam, the scene covers about 200 degrees from north through…
Apollo 17's Moonship
Awkward and angular looking, Apollo 17's lunar module Challenger was designed for flight in the near vacuum of space. Digitally enhanced and reprocessed, this picture taken from…
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…
Viewing discoveries from 29 December 2019 through 6 December 2019.