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 Sunset Night Sky over the Grand Canyon
Seeing mountain peaks glow red from inside the Grand Canyon was one of the most incredible sunset experiences of this amateur photographer's life. They appeared even more…
Solar Granules at Record High Resolution
Why does the Sun's surface keep changing? The help find out, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) has built the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, USA. The Inouye…
Zeta Oph: Runaway Star
Like a ship plowing through cosmic seas, runaway star Zeta Ophiuchi produces the arcing interstellar bow wave or bow shock seen in this stunning infrared portrait . In the…
Apollo 14 Heads for Home
When leaving lunar orbit in February 1971, the crew of Apollo 14 watched this Earthrise from their command module Kitty Hawk. With Earth's sunlit crescent just peeking over the…
Goldilocks Zones and Stars
The Goldilocks zone is the habitable zone around a star where it's not too hot and not too cold for liquid water to exist on the surface of orbiting planets. This intriguing…
Two Clusters and a Comet
This lovely starfield spans some four full moons (about 2 degrees) across the heroic northern constellation of Perseus . In telescopic exposures made during the nights of January…
Milky Way over Yellowstone
The Milky Way was not created by an evaporating lake. The pool of vivid blue water, about 10 meters across, is known as Silex Spring and is located in Yellowstone National Park in…
Star Formation in the Tadpole Nebula
What's all of the commotion in the Tadpole Nebula? Star formation. Dusty emission in the Tadpole Nebula, IC 410, lies about 12,000 light-years away in the northern constellation…
Comet CG Evaporates
Where do comet tails come from? There are no obvious places on the nuclei of comets from which the jets that create comet tails emanate. One of the best images of emerging jets is…
Hills, Ridges, and Tracks on Mars
Sometimes, even rovers on Mars stop to admire the scenery. Just late last November the Curiosity rover on Mars paused to photograph its impressive surroundings . One thing to…
Rubin's Galaxy
In this Hubble Space Telescope image the bright, spiky stars lie in the foreground toward the heroic northern constellation Perseus and well within our own Milky Way galaxy. In…
Into the Shadow
On January 21, 2019 moonwatchers on planet Earth saw a total lunar eclipse . In 35 frames this composite image follows the Moon that night as it crossed into Earth's dark umbral…
Globular Star Cluster NGC 6752
Some 13,000 light-years away toward the southern constellation Pavo, the globular star cluster NGC 6752 roams the halo of our Milky Way galaxy. Over 10 billion years old, NGC 6752…
The Hyades Star Cluster
It is the closest cluster of stars to the Sun. The Hyades open cluster is bright enough to have been remarked on even thousands of years ago, yet is not as bright or compact as…
Parker: Sounds of the Solar Wind
What does the solar wind sound like? A wind of fast moving particles blows out from our Sun, and although space transmits sound poorly, particle impact and variable-field data…
Quadrantid Meteors through Orion
Why are these meteor trails nearly parallel ? Because they were all shed by the same space rock and so can be traced back to the same direction on the sky: the radiant of the…
M1: The Incredible Expanding Crab Nebula
Are your eyes good enough to see the Crab Nebula expand? The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first on Charles Messier's famous list of things which are not comets. In fact,…
An Almost Eclipse of the Moon
This composited series of images follows the Moon on January 10, the first Full Moon of 2020, in Hungarian skies. The lunar disk is in mid-eclipse at the center of the sequence…
Apollo 17: A Stereo View from Lunar Orbit
Get out your red/blue glasses and check out this awesome stereo view of another world. The scene was recorded by Apollo 17 mission commander Eugene Cernan on December 11, 1972,…
NGC 247 and Friends
About 70,000 light-years across, NGC 247 is a spiral galaxy smaller than our Milky Way. Measured to be only 11 million light-years distant it is nearby though. Tilted nearly…
Iridescent Clouds over Sweden
Why would these clouds multi-colored? A relatively rare phenomenon in clouds known as iridescence can bring up unusual colors vividly or even a whole spectrum of colors…
Evidence of an Active Volcano on Venus
Are volcanoes still active on Venus? More volcanoes are known on Venus than Earth, but when Venus ian volcanoes last erupted is not directly known. Evidence bolstering very recent…
A Desert Eclipse
A good place to see a ring-of-fire eclipse, it seemed, would be from a desert. In a desert, there should be relatively few obscuring clouds and trees. Therefore late last December…
Stars and Dust in Corona Australis
Cosmic dust clouds and young, energetic stars inhabit this telescopic vista , less than 500 light-years away toward the northern boundary of Corona Australis , the Southern Crown.…
Viewing discoveries from 4 February 2020 through 12 January 2020.