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 Global Dust Storm on Mars
A dust storm on Mars can involve nearly the entire planet. As spring descended on the southern hemisphere of the red planet this June and July, a global dust storm raged. Pictured…
IC 418: The Spirograph Nebula
What is creating the strange texture of IC 418? Dubbed the Spirograph Nebula for its resemblance to drawings from a cyclical drawing tool , planetary nebula IC 418 shows patterns…
The Iron Sun
The ultraviolet light emitted by eleven times ionized iron at temperatures over 2 million degrees Farenheit was used to record the above picture of the Sun on September 22, the…
NGC 6992: A Glimpse of the Veil
After 5,000 years, the gorgeous Veil Nebula is still turning heads. Cataloged as NGC 6992, these glowing filaments of interstellar shocked gas are part of a larger spherical…
Elements of Nearby Spiral M33
Spiral galaxy M33 is a mid-sized member of our Local Group of Galaxies . M33 is also called the Triangulum Galaxy for the constellation in which it resides. About four times…
Comet Borrelly's Nucleus
What does a comet nucleus look like? To answer this question, NASA controllers drove an aging probe through the hostile environs of a distant comet, expecting that even if comet…
The Highs and Lows of Earth
What's up on planet Earth? A truly global answer has now been created by the Global Land One-km Base Elevation (GLOBE) Project. Pictured above is the best digital elevation map…
A Solar Prominence Erupts
Our Sun is still very active. Last year, our Sun went though Solar Maximum , the time in its 11-year cycle where the most sunspots and explosive activities occur. Sunspots , the…
Molecular Cloud Barnard 68
Where did all the stars go? What used to be considered a hole in the sky is now known to astronomers as a dark molecular cloud . Here, a high concentration of dust and molecular…
Full Throttle For Deep Space 1
At full throttle the Deep Space 1 spacecraft's innovative ion drive produces about 1/50th of a pound of thrust ... a force so great that it would just about hold up a piece of…
Where a Black Hole Roams
Black hole candidate XTE J1118+480 is known to roam the halo of our Milky Way Galaxy. This exotic system - thought to be a stellar mass black hole consuming matter from a…
X-Ray Stars in M15
Side by side, two x-ray stars greeted astronomers in this false-color Chandra Observatory x-ray image of a region near the core of globular star cluster M15 . The greeting was a…
SIRTF: Name This Satellite
NASA is preparing to launch its next Great Observatory in 2002, but it does not yet have a proper name. Can you help? Currently referred to only as the Space Infrared Telescope…
Surrounded by Mars
Just after landing on Mars in 1997, the robotic Mars Pathfinder main station took a quick first look around. This insurance panorama was taken even before the Sagan Memorial…
Southwest Andromeda
This new image composite of the southwest region of M31 from the Subaru Telescope shows many stars, nebulae, and star clusters never before resolved. An older population of stars…
Venus' Once Molten Surface
If you could look at Venus with radar eyes - this is what you might see. This computer reconstruction of the surface of Venus was created from data from the Magellan spacecraft .…
Eclipsed Moon in Infrared
The total lunar eclipse of September 1996 disappointed many observers in North America who were cursed with cloudy skies. However, the Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) satellite…
Cold Dust in the Eagle Nebula
Stars are born in M16's Eagle Nebula , a stellar nursery 7,000 light-years from Earth toward the constellation Serpens . The striking nebula's star forming pillars of gas and dust…
X-Rays and the Circinus Pulsar
A bizarre stellar corpse 19,000 light-years from Earth, pulsar PSR B1509-58 beckons from the small southern constellation of Circinus . Like its cousin at the heart of the Crab…
Zodiacal Light and the False Dawn
An unusual triangle of light will be particularly bright near the eastern horizon before sunrise during the next two months for observers in Earth's northern hemisphere. Once…
Spiral Galaxy NGC 3310 Across the Visible
The party is still going on in spiral galaxy NGC 3310. Roughly 100 million years ago, NGC 3310 likely collided with a smaller galaxy causing the large spiral galaxy to light up…
Galactic Center Flicker Indicates Black Hole
Why would the center of our Galaxy flicker? Many astronomers believe the only credible answer involves a black hole . During observations of Sagittarius A with the orbiting…
NGC 3293: A Bright Young Open Cluster
Hot blue stars shine brightly in this beautiful, recently formed galactic or “open” star cluster . Open cluster NGC 3293 is located in the constellation Carina , lies at a…
Moon Occults Saturn
On September 18, 1997, many stargazers in the U. S. were able to watch a lovely early morning lunar occultation as a bright Moon passed in front of Saturn. Using a 1.2 meter…
Viewing discoveries from 1 October 2001 through 8 September 2001.