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.
Hale-Bopp: The Great Comet of 1997
Ten short years ago, Comet Hale-Bopp rounded the Sun and offered a dazzling spectacle in planet Earth's night. This stunning view , recorded shortly after the comet's perihelion…
Three Galaxies and a Comet
Diffuse starlight and dark nebulae along the southern Milky Way arc over the horizon and sprawl diagonally through this gorgeous nightscape. The breath-taking mosaic spans a wide…
Jupiter Moon Movie
South is toward the top in this frame from a stunning movie featuring Jupiter and moons recorded last Thursday from the Central Coast of New South Wales, Australia. In fact, three…
NGC 1365: Majestic Island Universe
Barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365 is truly a majestic island universe some 200,000 light-years across. Located a mere 60 million light-years away toward the chemical constellation…
Enceladus Creates Saturn's E Ring
The active moon Enceladus appears to be making Saturn's E ring. An amazing picture showing the moon at work was taken late last year by the Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft and…
Bullet Pillars in Orion
Why are bullets of gas shooting out of the Orion Nebula? Nobody is yet sure. First discovered in 1983, each bullet is actually about the size of our Solar System , and moving at…
Welcome to Planet Earth
Welcome to Planet Earth , the third planet from a star named the Sun . The Earth is shaped like a sphere and composed mostly of rock . Over 70 percent of the Earth's surface is…
Lisbon Moonset
Brilliant Venus , a slender crescent Moon, and lights along the Ponte 25 de Abril glow against the western twilight in this lovely moonset scene from Lisbon, Portugal, recorded on…
Touran Sunrise
Clouds covered the eastern horizon on Monday, when the Sun rose over the expansive Touran Wildlife Reserve in northeastern Iran. Of course, on that day the Moon rose with the Sun,…
Goa Silhouettes
On Moonday, March 19, shortly before the equinox , locations in Asia and the Arctic were favoured by the New Moon's shadow during a partial solar eclipse . Although the view from…
Molecular Cloud Barnard 163
It may look to some like a duck, but it lays stars instead of eggs. In the center of the above image lies Barnard 163, a nebula of molecular gas and dust so thick that visible…
A Blue Crescent Moon from Space
What's happening to the Moon? Drifting around the Earth in 2006 July, astronauts from the International Space Station (ISS) captured a crescent Moon floating far beyond the…
Galaxy Group Hickson 44
Galaxies, like stars, frequently form groups. A group of galaxies is a system containing more than two galaxies but less than the tens or hundreds typically found in a cluster of…
A Higher Dimensional Universe?
Does our universe have higher but unusual spatial dimensions ? This idea has been gaining popularity to help explain why vastly separated parts of our universe appear so similar ,…
Eiffel Moon
Celestial and terrestrial lights are featured in this stunning image that includes the Moon in phases of the total lunar eclipse of March 3rd . In the foreground, the…
Eclipsing the Rings
The March 3rd total lunar eclipse was widely viewed by denizens of planet Earth. But only a day before, well placed observers could also watch a lunar occultation of Saturn as the…
NGC 2442: Galaxy in Volans
Distorted galaxy NGC 2442 can be found in the southern constellation of the flying fish , (Piscis) Volans . Located about 50 million light-years away, the galaxy's two spiral arms…
Barred Spiral Galaxy M95
Why do some spiral galaxies have a ring around the center? First and foremost, M95 is one of the closer examples of a big and beautiful barred spiral galaxy . Visible in the above…
Attacking Mars
The Spirit rover attacked Mars again in 2005 September. What might look, above, like a military attack, though, was once again just a scientific one - Spirit was instructed to…
Watch Jupiter Rotate
What would it be like to coast by Jupiter and watch it rotate? This was just the experience of the New Horizons spacecraft as it approached and flew by Jupiter earlier this year.…
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…
Eclipse with Lighthouse
A red Moon rose over Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA on March 3rd, immersed in Earth's shadow near the total phase of a lunar eclipse. This serene portrait of the eclipsed Moon in a…
Eclipse and Ecliptic
When a Full Moon lies near the ecliptic there can be a lunar eclipse . That cosmic alignment is well illustrated in this composite of eclipse images recorded last Saturday near…
Eclipsed Moon and Stars
This dramatic image features a dark red Moon during a total lunar eclipse -- celestial shadow play enjoyed by many denizens of planet Earth last Saturday. Recorded near Wildon,…
Viewing discoveries from 31 March 2007 through 8 March 2007.