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.
Plato and the Lunar Alps
The dark-floored, 95 kilometer wide crater Plato and sunlit peaks of the lunar Alps (Montes Alpes) are highlighted in this this sharp telescopic snapshot of the Moon's surface.…
M51: The Whirlpool Galaxy
The Whirlpool Galaxy is a classic spiral galaxy. At only 30 million light years distant and fully 60 thousand light years across, M51 , also known as NGC 5194, is one of the…
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A Solar Eruption from SDO
What just leapt from the Sun? A towering structure of solar plasma suddenly rose from the Sun's surface and unfurled into space -- a structure so large that many Earths would…
Meteor Dust
What's happening to this meteor? It is shedding its outer layers as it passes through the Earth's atmosphere and heats up. The sudden high temperatures not only cause the bright…
M104: The Sombrero Galaxy in Infrared
This floating ring is the size of a galaxy. In fact, it is a galaxy -- or at least part of one: the photogenic Sombrero Galaxy , one of the largest galaxies in the nearby Virgo…
Jupiter with the Great Red Spot
Jupiter reaches its 2026 opposition today, January 10. That puts our Solar System's most massive planet opposite the Sun and near its closest and brightest for viewing from planet…
Ice Halos by Moonlight and Sunlight
Both Moon and Sun create beautiful ice halos in planet Earth's sky. In fact, the two brightest celestial beacons are each surrounded by a complex of ice halos in these photos of…
IC 342: Hidden Galaxy in Camelopardalis
Similar in size to large, bright spiral galaxies in our neighborhood, IC 342 is a mere 10 million light-years distant toward the long-necked, northern constellation Camelopardalis…
Simeis 147: The Spaghetti Nebula Supernova Remnant
Its popular nickname is the Spaghetti Nebula. Officially cataloged as Simeis 147 and Sharpless 2-240, it is easy to get lost following the looping and twisting filaments of this…
Jupiter's Clouds in High Definition from Juno
How complex is Jupiter? NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter is finding the Jovian giant to be more complicated than expected . Jupiter's magnetic field has been discovered to be much…
The Red Rectangle Nebula from Hubble
How was the unusual Red Rectangle nebula created? At the nebula's center is an aging binary star system that surely powers the nebula but does not, as yet, explain its colors. The…
The Einstein Cross Gravitational Lens
Most galaxies have a single nucleus -- does this galaxy have four? The strange answer leads astronomers to conclude that the nucleus of the surrounding galaxy is not even visible…
Full Moonlight
The Full Moon is the brightest lunar phase, and tonight you can stand in the light of the first Full Moon of 2026. In fact, the Moon's full phase occurs on January 3 at 10:03 UTC,…
NanoSail-D2
In 2011, on January 20, NASA's NanoSail-D2 unfurled a very thin and very reflective 10 square meter sail becoming the first solar sail spacecraft in low Earth orbit. Often…
Auroral Corona
Cycle 25 solar maximum made 2025 a great year for aurora borealis (or aurora australis ) on planet Earth. And the high level of solar activity should extend into 2026. So, while…
HH-222: The Waterfall Nebula
What created the Waterfall Nebula? The origin is still being researched. The structure, officially designated Herbig-Haro 222, appears in the region of NGC 1999 in the Great Orion…
An Artificial Comet
Yes, but can your comet tail do this? No, and what you are seeing is not the tail of a comet . The picture features a cleverly overlayed time-lapse sequence of a group of…
M1: The Crab Nebula
This is the mess that is left when a star explodes. The Crab Nebula , the result of a supernova seen in 1054 AD , is filled with mysterious filaments. The filaments are not only…
NGC 1898: Globular Cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud
Jewels don't shine this bright -- only stars do. And almost every spot in this jewel-box of an image from the Hubble Space Telescope is a star. Now, some stars are more red than…
Apollo 17's Moonship
Awkward and angular looking, Apollo 17's lunar module Challenger was designed for flight in the near vacuum of space. Digitally enhanced and reprocessed, this picture taken from…
3I/ATLAS Flyby
Attention grabbing interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS made its not-so-close flyby of our fair planet on December 19 at a distance of 1.8 astronomical units. That's about 900…
Unicorn, Fox Fur and Christmas Tree
A star forming region cataloged as NGC 2264 , this beautiful but complex arrangement of interstellar gas and dust is about 2,700 light-years distant in the faint but fanciful…
Mystery: Little Red Dots in the Early Universe
What are these little red dots (LRDs)? Nobody knows. Discovered only last year, hundreds of LRDs have now been found by the James Webb Space Telescope in the early universe .…
Red Sprites and Circular Elves Lightning over Italy
What's happening in the sky? Lightning . The most commonly seen type of lightning involves flashes of bright white light between clouds. Over the past 50 years, though, other…
Viewing discoveries from 15 January 2026 through 23 December 2025.