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.
The Deep Lagoon
Ridges of glowing interstellar gas and dark dust clouds inhabit the turbulent, cosmic depths of the Lagoon Nebula. Also known as M8, The bright star forming region is about 5,000…
STEVE and Milky Way Cross over Rural Road
Not every road ends in a STEVE. A week ago, a sky enthusiast's journey began with a goal: to photograph an aurora over Lake Huron . Driving through rural Ontario , Canada , the…
IC 4592: The Blue Horsehead Reflection Nebula
Do you see the horse's head? What you are seeing is not the famous Horsehead nebula toward Orion , but rather a fainter nebula that only takes on a familiar form with deeper…
Arp 142: The Hummingbird Galaxy
What's happening to this spiral galaxy? Just a few hundred million years ago, NGC 2936, the upper of the two large galaxies shown at the bottom, was likely a normal spiral galaxy…
A Ring of Fire Sunrise Solar Eclipse
What's rising above the horizon behind those clouds? It's the Sun. Most sunrises don't look like this, though, because most sunrises don't include the Moon. In the early morning…
Afternoon Analemma
An analemma is that figure-8 curve you get when you mark the position of the Sun at the same time each day for one year. To make this one, a 4x5 pinhole camera was set up looking…
Cosmos in Reflection
During the day , over 12,000 large mirrors reflect sunlight at the 100-megawatt, molten-salt, solar thermal power plant at the western edge of the Gobi desert near Dunhuang ,…
Tagging Bennu
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft's arm reached out and touched asteroid 101955 Bennu on October 20 , 2020, after a careful approach to the small, near-Earth asteroid's boulder-strewn…
Methane Discovered on Distant Exoplanet
Where else might life exist? One of humanity's great outstanding questions , locating planets where extrasolar life might survive took a step forward in 2019 with the discovery of…
HH 211: Jets from a Forming Star
Do stars always create jets as they form? No one is sure. As a gas cloud gravitationally contracts , it forms a disk that can spin too fast to continue contracting into a…
The Red Sprite and the Tree
The sprite and tree could hardly be more different. To start, the red sprite is an unusual form of lightning, while the tree is a common plant . The sprite is far away -- high in…
Moon Mountains Magnified during Ring of Fire Eclipse
What are those dark streaks in this composite image of a solar eclipse? They are reversed shadows of mountains at the edge of the Moon. The center image, captured from Xiamen ,…
Fireball over Iceland
On September 12, from a location just south of the Arctic Circle, stones of Iceland's modern Arctic Henge point skyward in this startling scene. Entertaining an intrepid group of…
Venus, Moon, and the Smoking Mountain
Venus has returned , now appearing in planet Earth's predawn skies as a brilliant morning star . From a window seat on a flight to Mexico City, the bright celestial beacon was…
NGC 7331 and Beyond
Big, beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 7331 is often touted as an analog to our own Milky Way . About 50 million light-years distant in the northern constellation Pegasus , NGC 7331 was…
NGC 4632: Galaxy with a Hidden Polar Ring
Galaxy NGC 4632 hides a secret from optical telescopes. It is surrounded by a ring of cool hydrogen gas orbiting at 90 degrees to its spiral disk. Such polar ring galaxies have…
Galaxy Cluster Abell 370 and Beyond
Some 4 billion light-years away, massive galaxy cluster Abell 370 is captured in this sharp Hubble Space Telescope snapshot . The cluster of galaxies only appears to be dominated…
Beautiful Comet Nishimura
This scene would be beautiful even without the comet. By itself, the sunrise sky is an elegant deep blue on high, with faint white stars peeking through, while near the horizon is…
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…
Comet Nishimura Grows
Comet Nishimura is growing. More precisely, the tails C/2023 P1 (Nishimura) are growing as it nears the Sun. Discovered only last month, the comet is already near naked eye…
Star Factory Messier 17
Sculpted by stellar winds and radiation, the star factory known as Messier 17 lies some 5,500 light-years away in the nebula-rich constellation Sagittarius . At that distance,…
The Large Cloud of Magellan
The 16th century Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan and his crew had plenty of time to study the southern sky during the first circumnavigation of planet Earth. As a result,…
HESS Telescopes Explore the High-Energy Sky
They may look like modern mechanical dinosaurs, but they are enormous swiveling eyes that watch the sky. The High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) Observatory is composed of…
Blue Supermoon Beyond Syracuse
The last full moon was doubly unusual. First of all, it was a blue moon . A modern definition of a blue moon is a second full moon to occur during one calendar month. Since there…
Viewing discoveries from 28 September 2023 through 5 September 2023.