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.
M1: The 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,…
Equinox at the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent
To see the feathered serpent descend the Mayan pyramid requires exquisite timing. You must visit El Castillo -- in Mexico 's Yucatán Peninsula -- near an equinox . Then, during…
Wolf-Rayet 124
Driven by powerful stellar winds, expanding shrouds of gas and dust frame hot, luminous star Wolf-Rayet 124 in this sharp infrared view . The eye-catching 6-spike star pattern is…
The Medusa Nebula
Braided and serpentine filaments of glowing gas suggest this nebula's popular name, The Medusa Nebula. Also known as Abell 21, this Medusa is an old planetary nebula some 1,500…
Millions of Stars in Omega Centauri
Globular star cluster Omega Centauri , also known as NGC 5139, is 15,000 light-years away. The cluster is packed with about 10 million stars much older than the Sun within a…
Jupiter and Venus Converge over Germany
This was a sky to show the kids. Early this month the two brightest planets in the night sky, Jupiter and Venus , appeared to converge . At their closest, the two planets were…
W5: The Soul Nebula
Stars are forming in the Soul of the Queen of Aethopia . More specifically, a large star forming region called the Soul Nebula can be found in the direction of the constellation…
Rainbow Tree
What lies at the end of a rainbow? Something different for everyone. For the photographer taking this picture, for example, one end of the rainbow ended at a tree. Others nearby,…
Saturn's Hyperion: A Moon with Odd Craters
What lies at the bottom of Hyperion 's strange craters? To help find out, the robot Cassini spacecraft that once orbited Saturn swooped past the sponge-textured moon and took…
3D Bennu
Put on your red/blue glasses and float next to asteroid 101955 Bennu . Shaped like a spinning toy top with boulders littering its rough surface, the tiny Solar System world is…
Orion and the Running Man
Few cosmic vistas excite the imagination like The Great Nebula in Orion . Visible as a faint celestial smudge to the naked-eye, the nearest large star-forming region sprawls…
DART vs Dimorphos
On the first planetary defense test mission from planet Earth, the DART spacecraft captured this close-up on 26 September 2022, three seconds before slamming into the surface of…
Artificial Night Sky Brightness
Where have all the dim stars gone? From many places on the Earth including major cities, the night sky has been reduced from a fascinating display of thousands of stars to a…
Deep Field: The Large Magellanic Cloud
Is this a spiral galaxy ? No. Actually, it is the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), the largest satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way Galaxy . The LMC is classified as a dwarf…
Jupiter and Venus from Earth
It was visible around the world. The sunset conjunction of Jupiter and Venus in 2012 was visible almost no matter where you lived on Earth. Anyone on the planet with a clear…
Jupiter and Venus over Italy
What are those two bright spots? Planets. A few days ago, the two brightest planets in the night sky passed within a single degree of each other in what is termed a conjunction .…
10 Days of Venus and Jupiter
Venus and Jupiter may have caught your attention lately. The impending close conjunction of the two brightest planets visible in clear evening skies has been hard to miss . With…
RCW 86: Historical Supernova Remnant
In 185 AD, Chinese astronomers recorded the appearance of a new star in the Nanmen asterism. That part of the sky is identified with Alpha and Beta Centauri on modern star charts.…
Unraveling NGC 3169
Spiral galaxy NGC 3169 looks to be unraveling like a ball of cosmic yarn. It lies some 70 million light-years away, south of bright star Regulus toward the faint constellation…
The Flaming Star Nebula
Is star AE Aurigae on fire? No. Even though AE Aurigae is named the Flaming Star and the surrounding nebula IC 405 is named the Flaming Star Nebula , and even though the nebula…
Crescent Moon Beyond Greek Temple
Why is a thin crescent moon never seen far from a horizon? Because the only geometry that gives a thin crescent lunar phase occurs when the Moon appears close to the Sun in the…
Zodiacal Ray with Venus and Jupiter
What's causing that unusual ray of light extending from the horizon? Dust orbiting the Sun. At certain times of the year, a band of sun-reflecting dust from the inner Solar System…
Saturn's Iapetus: Moon with a Strange Surface
What would make a moon look like a walnut? A strange ridge that circles Saturn 's moon Iapetus 's equator, visible near the bottom of the featured image , makes it appear similar…
Crescent Moon Occultation
On February 22, a young Moon shared the western sky at sunset with bright planets Venus and Jupiter along the ecliptic plane . The beautiful celestial conjunction was visible…
Viewing discoveries from 20 March 2023 through 25 February 2023.