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.
Messier 66 Close Up
Big, beautiful spiral galaxy Messier 66 lies a mere 35 million light-years away . The gorgeous island universe is about 100 thousand light-years across, similar in size to the…
The Vertical Magnetic Field of NGC 5775
How far do magnetic fields extend up and out of spiral galaxies? For decades astronomers knew only that some spiral galaxies had magnetic field s. However, after NRAO 's Very…
Central NGC 1316: After Galaxies Collide
How did this strange-looking galaxy form? Astronomers turn detectives when trying to figure out the cause of unusual jumbles of stars, gas, and dust like NGC 1316. Inspection…
Southern Cross over Chilean Volcano
Have you ever seen the Southern Cross? This famous four-star icon is best seen from Earth's Southern Hemisphere. The featured image was taken last month in Chile and captures the…
Massive Nearby Spiral Galaxy NGC 2841
It is one of the more massive galaxies known. A mere 46 million light-years distant, spiral galaxy NGC 2841 can be found in the northern constellation of Ursa Major . This sharp…
Recycling Cassiopeia A
Massive stars in our Milky Way Galaxy live spectacular lives. Collapsing from vast cosmic clouds, their nuclear furnaces ignite and create heavy elements in their cores. After a…
The Milky Ring
An expanse of cosmic dust, stars and nebulae along the plane of our Milky Way galaxy form a beautiful ring in this projected all-sky view . The creative panorama covers the entire…
M78 Wide Field
Interstellar dust clouds and glowing nebulae abound in the fertile constellation of Orion . One of the brightest, M78 , is centered in this colorful, wide field view , covering an…
The Magnetic Field of the Whirlpool Galaxy
Do magnetic fields always flow along spiral arms? Our face-on view of the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) allows a spectacularly clear view of the spiral wave pattern in a disk-shaped…
A Lunar Corona with Jupiter and Saturn
Why does a cloudy moon sometimes appear colorful? The effect , called a lunar corona , is created by the quantum mechanical diffraction of light around individual, similarly-sized…
The Medulla Nebula Supernova Remnant
What powers this unusual nebula? CTB-1 is the expanding gas shell that was left when a massive star toward the constellation of Cassiopeia exploded about 10,000 years ago. The…
Jets from Unusual Galaxy Centaurus A
The jets emanating from Centaurus A are over a million light years long. These jets of streaming plasma , expelled by a giant black hole in the center of this spiral galaxy, light…
The Mountains of NGC 2174
This fantastic skyscape lies near the edge of NGC 2174 a star forming region about 6,400 light-years away in the nebula-rich constellation of Orion. It follows mountainous clouds…
A Plutonian Landscape
This shadowy landscape of majestic mountains and icy plains stretches toward the horizon on a small, distant world. It was captured from a range of about 18,000 kilometers when…
Aurora Slathers Up the Sky
Like salsa verde on your favorite burrito, a green aurora slathers up the sky in this 2017 June 25 snapshot from the International Space Station. About 400 kilometers (250 miles)…
Arches Across an Arctic Sky
What are these two giant arches across the sky? Perhaps the more familiar one, on the left, is the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy . This grand disk of stars and nebulas here…
A Historic Brazilian Constellation
The night sky is filled with stories. Cultures throughout history have projected some of their most enduring legends onto the stars above. Generations of people see these stellar…
Star Cluster R136 Breaks Out
In the center of nearby star-forming region lies a huge cluster containing some of the largest, hottest, and most massive stars known. These stars, known collectively as star…
Titan: Moon over Saturn
Like Earth's moon, Saturn's largest moon Titan is locked in synchronous rotation. This mosaic of images recorded by the Cassini spacecraft in May of 2012 shows its anti-Saturn…
NGC 1365: Majestic Island Universe
Barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365 is truly a majestic island universe some 200,000 light-years across. Located a mere 60 million light-years away toward the chemical constellation…
Total Solar Eclipse 2020
Along a narrow path crossing southern South America through Chile and Argentina, the final New Moon of 2020 moved in front of the Sun on December 14 in the year's only total solar…
Striped Sand Dunes on Mars
Why are these sand dunes on Mars striped? No one is sure. The featured image shows striped dunes in Kunowsky Crater on Mars, photographed recently with the Mars Reconnaissance…
The Small Cloud of Magellan
What is the Small Magellanic Cloud? It has turned out to be a galaxy. People who have wondered about this little fuzzy patch in the southern sky included Portuguese navigator…
A Phoenix Aurora over Iceland
All of the other aurora watchers had gone home. By 3:30 am in Iceland , on a quiet September night, much of that night's auroras had died down. Suddenly, unexpectedly, a new burst…
Viewing discoveries from 28 January 2021 through 3 January 2021.