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.
Mir Flares Farewell
Streaking low across the western horizon after sunset, the Russian Mir space station makes a final pass through the evening sky above the coastal city of Salvador, Brazil. In this…
Jupiter, Saturn and Messier 45
Brilliant Venus falls out of the evening sky as March ends, but Jupiter and Saturn remain well up above the western horizon. Jupiter blazes forth above and to the left of a…
Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 2903
NGC 2903 is a spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way Galaxy . Similarities include its general size and a central bar . One striking difference, however, is the appearance of…
Discovery Spring
Welcome to the equinox ! Moving northward in Earth's sky, today the Sun crosses the celestial equator at 13:31 Universal Time bringing Spring to the north and Fall to the south.…
Pluto in True Color
Pluto is mostly brown. The above picture captures the true colors of Pluto as well as the highest surface resolution so far recovered . No spacecraft has yet visited this most…
The Nearest Stars
Which stars are closest to the Sun ? The closest is Proxima Centauri , one of three stars that orbit each other about 4 light-years away in the Alpha-Centauri system. Alpha…
Astro-2 In Orbit
Six years ago , a cluster of three ultraviolet telescopes flew into orbit on the Astro-2 mission aboard the space shuttle Endeavour . Seen here perched in Endeavour's payload bay…
Rockets and Robert Goddard
Robert H. Goddard , one of the founding fathers of modern rocketry, was born in Worcester Massachusetts in 1882. As a 16 year old, Goddard read H.G. Wells' science fiction classic…
Islands in the Photosphere
Awash in a sea of plasma and anchored in magnetic fields , sunspots are planet-sized, dark islands in the solar photosphere , the bright surface of the Sun. Before the…
Comet McNaught-Hartley
Outbound and climbing above the plane of our solar system, comet McNaught-Hartley (C/1999 T1) is presently soaring through northern skies. This telescopic picture , a composite of…
A Sun Pillar
Have you ever seen a sun pillar ? When the air is cold and the Sun is rising or setting , falling ice crystals can reflect sunlight and create an unusual column of light. Ice…
M82 After the Crash
When did the Cigar Galaxy light up? Evidence indicates how M82, the Cigar Galaxy , became so bright and peculiar: it collided with neighboring galaxy M81 . Astronomers become…
NGC 1818: A Young Globular Cluster
Globular clusters once ruled the Milky Way . Back in the old days , back when our Galaxy first formed, perhaps thousands of globular clusters roamed our Galaxy . Today, there are…
Apollo / Surveyor Stereo View
Put on your red/blue glasses and gaze into this dramatic stereo view from the surface of the Moon ! Inspired by last Saturday's APOD , experimentor Patrick Vantuyne offers this…
X-Rays From HCG 62
Scanning the skies for galaxies Canadian astronomer Paul Hickson and colleagues identified some 100 compact groups of galaxies , now appropriately called Hickson Compact Groups…
Bright Venus
Have you seen a bright evening star in the western sky lately? That's no star, that's planet Venus the second “rock” from the Sun . Blazing at -4.6 magnitude , Venus, after the…
Saturn At Night
From a spectacular vantage point over 1.4 billion kilometers from the sun, the Voyager 1 spacecraft looked back toward the inner solar system to record this startling view of…
M27: The Dumbbell Nebula
The first hint of what will become of our Sun was discovered inadvertently in 1764. At that time, Charles Messier was compiling a list of “annoying” diffuse objects not to be…
Survivor: NEAR Shoemaker On Asteroid Eros
Not part of a television game series, the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft survived its unprecedented landing on an asteroid last month. As suggested in the illustration inset above ,…
TT Cygni: Carbon Star
TT Cygni is a cool red giant star with a wind. This false-color picture of TT Cyg was made using a coordinated array of millimeter wavelength radio telescopes and shows radio…
Apollo 12 Visits Surveyor 3
Apollo 12 was the second mission to land humans on the Moon . The landing site was picked to be near the location of Surveyor 3, a robot spacecraft that had landed on the Moon…
LkHa101: The Hole in the Doughnut
You'd need a really big cup of coffee with this doughnut ... because the hole in the middle is about a billion kilometers across. Centered on the Sun, a circle that size would lie…
Maximum Sun
Astronomers recently witnessed an astounding, large scale solar event as the Sun's north and south magnetic poles changed places! But, this complete solar magnetic field flip was…
A Space Station Meets its Destiny
The International Space Station (ISS) had a date with Destiny earlier this month. More specifically, the crew of the Space Shuttle Atlantis installed the science laboratory named…
Viewing discoveries from 23 March 2001 through 28 February 2001.