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.
A Meteoric View of Apollo 13
Meteors, also called shooting stars, normally begin as bits of dust from the tails of comets or even small pieces chipped off asteroids. Falling toward Earth, these particles…
Damage to Apollo 13
In April of 1970, after an oxygen tank exploded and damaged their service module, the Apollo 13 astronauts were forced to abandon their plans to make the third manned lunar…
Lunar Farside from Apollo 13
In April of 1970, after an explosion damaged their spacecraft, the Apollo 13 astronauts were forced to abandon their plans to make the third manned lunar landing. Still, while…
Saturn, Rings, and Two Moons
This image of Saturn was made by NASA's robot spacecraft Voyager 2 as it began to explore the Saturn system in 1981. Saturn's famous rings are visible along with two of its moons,…
The Night Side of Saturn
This image of Saturn was made in November 1980 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft as it flew past the ringed gas giant planet. From a spectacular vantage point, looking back toward the…
The Firework Nebula
The Firework Nebula, known to astronomers as “GK Per”, is the result of a type of stellar explosion called a nova. In a nova, a very compact star called a white dwarf blasts away…
The Great Nebula in Orion
The Great Nebula in Orion, M42, can be found on the night sky just below and to the left of the easily identifiable belt of three stars in the popular constellation Orion. This…
The Cartwheel Galaxy
The Cartwheel Galaxy shows a ring that is the result of a collision between a small and a large galaxy. After a small galaxy has moved through a big galaxy - in this case one that…
The Hooker Telescope on Mt. Wilson
In the 1920s, pictures from the Hooker Telescope on Mt. Wilson fundamentally changed our understanding of the cosmos. Astronomer Edwin Hubble , using photographs he took with this…
Ida and Dactyl: Asteroid and Moon
An asteroid with a moon! The robot spacecraft Galileo whose primary mission is to explore the Jupiter system, has encountered and photographed two asteroids during its long…
The Earth-Moon System
A double planet? From 4 million miles away on December 16, 1992, NASA's robot spacecraft Galileo took this picture of the Earth-moon system. The bright, sunlit half of the Earth…
The Cat's Eye Nebula
Three thousand light years away, a dying star throws off shells of glowing gas. This Hubble Space Telescope image reveals “The Cat's Eye Nebula” to be one of the most complex…
An Ultraviolet Image of Messier 101
This giant spiral galaxy, Messier 101 (M101), was photographed by the Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope onboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour during the Astro-2 mission (March 2 - 18,…
The Spiral Galaxy M100
The M100 galaxy is a large spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way, containing over 100 billion stars. It is over 150 million light years away, so the light we see left when…
Jupiter from Voyager
Imagine a hurricane that lasted for 300 years! This picture of the planet Jupiter was taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft as it passed the planet in 1979. Jupiter, a gas giant…
The Crab Nebula and Geminga in Gamma Rays
What if you could “see” in gamma-rays? If you could, these two spinning neutron stars or pulsars would be among the brightest objects in the sky. This computer processed image…
Gamma Ray All Sky Map
What if you could “see” gamma rays? This computer processed image represents a map of the entire sky at photon energies above 100 million electron Volts. These gamma-ray photons…
The Earth from Apollo 17
In 1972 Astronauts on the United States's last lunar mission, Apollo 17, took this picture looking back at the Earth on their way to the moon. The continents of Antarctica and…
The Aftermath of the Great Supernova in 1987
In 1987 a star in one of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies exploded. In 1994 the Hubble Space Telescope, in orbit around the earth, took a very detailed picture of the remnants…
The Pleiades Star Cluster
The Pleiades star cluster, M45, is one of the brightest star clusters visible in the northern hemisphere. It consists of many bright, hot stars that were all formed at the same…
Neutron Star Earth
If the Earth could somehow be transformed to the ultra-high density of a neutron star, it might appear as it does in the above computer generated figure. Due to the very strong…
Viewing discoveries from 9 July 1995 through 16 June 1995.