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.
Dueling Auroras
Will it be curtains for one of these auroras? A quick inspection indicates that it is curtains for both, as the designation “ curtains ” well categorizes the type of aurora…
Rumors of a Strange Universe
Three years ago results were first presented indicating that most of the energy in our universe is not in stars or galaxies but is tied to space itself. In the language of…
Neptune's Great Dark Spot: Gone But Not Forgotten
When NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by distant Neptune in August of 1989, astronomers were shocked. Since Neptune receives only 3 percent the sunlight Jupiter does, they…
Meteor Storm Sights and Sounds
This dramatic four-frame animation shows a fireball meteor and its developing persistent “smoke” train, recorded two weeks ago in skies near Salvador, Brazil. Indeed similar…
Coronal Inflow
The active Sun has thrown a lot our way lately, including storms of particles streaming outward in the solar wind and clouds of plasma which triggered awesome auroral displays.…
Extra-Solar Planetary Atmosphere Detected
By directly detecting the atmosphere of a planet outside our Solar System , humanity has taken another small step toward finding extraterrestrial life . The unexpected detection…
Ancient Layered Rocks on Mars
Is this a picture of Mars or Earth? Oddly enough, it is a picture of Mars . What may appear to some as a terrestrial coastline is in fact a formation of ancient layered rocks and…
Leonids From the Road
Sometimes you just have to stop and watch the meteors . In the early morning hours of November 18, a band of eleven people searched for a flat and cloudless site to see the 2001…
M16: Stars from Eagle's EGGs
Newborn stars are forming in the Eagle Nebula. This image , taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, shows evaporating gaseous globules (EGGs) emerging from pillars of…
Mariner's Mercury
Mercury , the closest planet to the Sun, remains the most mysterious of the Solar System's inner planets. Hiding in the Sun's glare it is a difficult target for Earth bound…
Counting Falling Stardust
In the clear, dark and moonless predawn hours of November 18 , Greenbelt, Maryland's local baseball field was packed. The crowd stared skyward and occasionally conversed in hushed…
Fireball, Smoke Trail, Meteor Storm
Returning from orbit , space shuttles enter the atmosphere at about 8 kilometers per second as friction heats their protective ceramic tiles to over 1,400 degrees Celsius. By…
The Galactic Ring of NGC 6782
Do spiral galaxies look the same in every color? NGC 6782 demonstrates colorfully that they do not. In visible light , NGC 6782 appears to be a normal spiral galaxy with a bright…
A Leonids Star Field
As meteor after meteor streaked across a moonless sky, photographers across the world snapped pictures of the 2001 Leonids Meteor Shower . Many recognized this as the best meteor…
A 2001 Leonids Meteor Shower Fireball
The 2001 Leonids Meteor Shower gave quite a show to many parts of the world yesterday during the early morning hours. Many sleepy observers venturing into their own backyards were…
A Leonid Meteor Explodes
Last night and tonight, a lucky few may see a meteor explode. As our Earth passes unusually close to debris expelled from Comet Tempel-Tuttle , many sand-sized particles from this…
Catching Falling Stardust
This carrot-shaped track is actually little more than 5 hundredths of an inch long. It is the trail of a meteroid through the high-tech substance aerogel exposed to space by the…
Leonid Watching
Will the Leonids storm this year? The annual Leonid meteor shower should peak this weekend and some predictions suggest that “storm” rates of a thousand or more meteors per hour…
Recycling Columbia
Twenty years ago this week, the Space Shuttle Columbia became the first reusable spaceship . Its second trip to low Earth orbit and back again began on November 12, 1981,…
Auroras Over Both Earth Poles
Auroras in the north and south can be nearly mirror images of each other. Such mirroring had been suspected for centuries but dramatically confirmed only last month by detailed…
A Gravity Map of Earth
Is gravity the same over the surface of the Earth ? No -- it turns out that in some places you will feel slightly heavier than others. The above relief map shows in exaggerated…
Is Mystery Object an Orphan Afterglow?
What is that unusual object? Astronomers can identify most objects that are imaged on the sky, but not all. Pictured above is one that currently defies classification. Attributes…
An Annotated Leonid
The 1998 Leonids Meteor Shower was one of the most photographed meteor events in history. Patient observers saw bright meteors streak across dark skies every few minutes,…
Lunar Dust and Duct Tape
Why is the Moon dusty ? On Earth, rocks are weathered by wind and water, creating soil and sand. On the Moon, the long history of micrometeorite bombardment has blasted away at…
Viewing discoveries from 3 December 2001 through 10 November 2001.