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.
Aurora Dome Sky
It seemed like night, but part of the sky glowed purple. It was the now famous night of May 10, 2024, when people over much of the world reported beautiful aurora-filled skies .…
North Celestial Aurora
Graceful star trail arcs reflect planet Earth's daily rotation in this colorful night skyscape. To create the timelapse composite, on May 12 consecutive exposures were recorded…
Aurora Banks Peninsula
This well-composed composite panoramic view looks due south from Banks Peninsula near Christchurch on New Zealand's South Island. The base of a tower-like rocky sea stack is awash…
Aurora Georgia
A familiar sight from Georgia, USA, the Moon sets near the western horizon in this rural night skyscape. Captured on May 10 before local midnight, the image overexposes the Moon's…
AR 3664 at the Sun's Edge
What did the monster active region that created the recent auroras look like when at the Sun's edge? There, AR 3664 better showed its 3D structure. Pictured, a large multi-pronged…
The 37 Cluster
For the mostly harmless denizens of planet Earth, the brighter stars of open cluster NGC 2169 seem to form a cosmic 37 . Did you expect 42 ? From our perspective, the improbable…
AR 3664 on a Setting Sun
It was larger than the Earth. It was so big you could actually see it on the Sun's surface without magnification. It contained powerful and tangled magnetic fields as well as…
Red Aurora over Poland
Northern lights don't usually reach this far south. Magnetic chaos in the Sun's huge Active Region 3664 , however, produced a surface explosion that sent a burst of electrons,…
AR 3664: Giant Sunspot Group
Right now, one of the largest sunspot groups in recent history is crossing the Sun. Active Region 3664 is not only big -- it's violent, throwing off clouds of particles into the…
The Galaxy, the Jet, and a Famous Black Hole
Bright elliptical galaxy Messier 87 (M87) is home to the supermassive black hole captured in 2017 by planet Earth's Event Horizon Telescope in the first ever image of a black…
Black Hole Accreting with Jet
What happens when a black hole devours a star? Many details remain unknown, but observations are providing new clues. In 2014, a powerful explosion was recorded by the…
A Black Hole Disrupts a Passing Star
What happens to a star that goes near a black hole? If the star directly impacts a massive black hole , then the star falls in completely -- and everything vanishes. More likely ,…
3 ATs
Despite their resemblance to R2D2 , these three are not the droids you're looking for. Instead, the enclosures house 1.8 meter Auxiliary Telescopes (ATs) at Paranal Observatory in…
Temperatures on Exoplanet WASP-43b
A mere 280 light-years from Earth , tidally locked, Jupiter-sized exoplanet WASP-43b orbits its parent star once every 0.8 Earth days. That puts it about 2 million kilometers…
M100: A Grand Design Spiral Galaxy
Majestic on a truly cosmic scale, M100 is appropriately known as a grand design spiral galaxy. The large galaxy of over 100 billion stars has well-defined spiral arms, similar to…
IC 1795: The Fishhead Nebula
To some, this nebula looks like the head of a fish . However, this colorful cosmic portrait really features glowing gas and obscuring dust clouds in IC 1795, a star forming region…
GK Per: Nova and Planetary Nebula
The star system GK Per is known to be associated with only two of the three nebulas pictured . At 1500 light years distant, Nova Persei 1901 ( GK Persei ) was the second closest…
Comet, Planet, Moon
Three bright objects satisfied seasoned stargazers of the western sky just after sunset earlier this month. The most familiar was the Moon , seen on the upper left in a crescent…
Rings Around the Ring Nebula
The Ring Nebula (M57) is more complicated than it appears through a small telescope. The easily visible central ring is about one light-year across, but this remarkably deep…
All Sky Moon Shadow
If the Sun is up but the sky is dark and the horizon is bright all around, you might be standing in the Moon's shadow during a total eclipse of the Sun. In fact, the all-sky Moon…
Regulus and the Dwarf Galaxy
In northern hemisphere spring , bright star Regulus is easy to spot above the eastern horizon. The alpha star of the constellation Leo, Regulus is the spiky star centered in this…
NGC 604: Giant Stellar Nursery
Located some 3 million light-years away in the arms of nearby spiral galaxy M33 , giant stellar nursery NGC 604 is about 1,300 light-years across. That's nearly 100 times the size…
Dragon's Egg Bipolar Emission Nebula
How did a star form this beautiful nebula? In the middle of emission nebula NGC 6164 is an unusually massive star . The central star has been compared to an oyster's pearl and an…
Contrail Shadow X
What created this giant X in the clouds? It was the shadow of contrails . When airplanes fly, humid engine exhaust may form water droplets that might freeze in Earth's cold upper…
Viewing discoveries from 20 May 2024 through 23 April 2024.