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.
Globular Cluster M15 from Hubble
Stars, like bees, swarm around the center of bright globular cluster M15. This ball of over 100,000 stars is a relic from the early years of our Galaxy , and continues to orbit…
Jupiter's Great Red Spot from Voyager 1
It is a hurricane twice the size of the Earth. It has been raging at least as long as telescopes could see it, and shows no signs of slowing. It is Jupiter's Great Red Spot , the…
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…
Tycho's Supernova Remnant
Tycho! Tycho! burning bright In the darkness of the night, What exploding white dwarf star Did frame thy remnant from afar, In the distant deep dark skies Under gaze of human…
The Antennae
Some 60 million light-years away in the southerly constellation Corvus , two large galaxies collided . But the stars in the two galaxies, cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039 ,…
Scintillating
On June 4, 2010 Regulus, alpha star of the constellation Leo, and wandering planet Mars were at about the same apparent brightness, separated on the sky by 1.5 degrees. An…
The Dark Tower in Scorpius
In silhouette against a crowded star field toward the constellation Scorpius , this dusty cosmic cloud evokes for some the image of an ominous dark tower . In fact, clumps of dust…
Hydrogen in the LMC
A satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is an alluring sight in dark southern skies and the constellation Dorado . A mere 180,000 light-years…
Monsters of IC 1396
Is there a monster in IC 1396 ? Known to some as the Elephant's Trunk Nebula, parts of the glowing gas and dust clouds of this star formation region may appear to take on…
The Cat's Eye Nebula from Hubble
Staring across interstellar space, the alluring Cat's Eye nebula lies three thousand light-years from Earth. A classic planetary nebula , the Cat's Eye (NGC 6543) represents a…
Shadows at the Lunar South Pole
What is it? It's a multi-temporal illumination map , of course. To make it, the wide angle camera on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft collected 1,700 images over a…
Virgo Cluster Galaxies
Well over a thousand galaxies are known members of the Virgo Cluster , the closest large cluster of galaxies to our own local group . In fact, the galaxy cluster is difficult to…
Peculiar Galaxies of Arp 273
The spiky stars in the foreground of this sharp cosmic portrait are well within our own Milky Way Galaxy . The two eye-catching galaxies lie far beyond the Milky Way , at a…
Rio Morning Moonset
As the Sun rose , a nearly full Moon set in this serene seaside vista captured last Monday from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In the foreground, the reddened early morning sunlight…
The GRB 110328A Symphony
A symphony of planet-wide observations began abruptly on March 28 when the Earth-orbiting Swift satellite detected a burst of high-frequency gamma-rays from GRB 110328A. When the…
Visual Effects: Wonders of the Universe
What visual effects are depicted in this video? The effects were created by BDH for the BBC television show Wonders of the Universe, but are unlabeled in this version. Even so,…
View from Everest
What would it be like to stand atop the tallest mountain on Earth? To see a full panoramic vista from there, scroll right. Visible are snow peaked mountains near and far,…
The Tadpoles of IC 410
This telescopic close-up shows off the otherwise faint emission nebula IC 410 in striking false-colors. It also features two remarkable inhabitants of the cosmic pond of gas and…
Messier 101
Big, beautiful spiral galaxy M101 is one of the last entries in Charles Messier's famous catalog, but definitely not one of the least . About 170,000 light-years across, this…
Young Stars in the Rho Ophiuchi Cloud
Dust clouds and embedded newborn stars glow at infrared wavelengths in this tantalizing false-color composition from WISE, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer . The cosmic…
Centaurus Radio Jets Rising
What if you could see the huge radio jets of Centaurus A rising? The Cen A radio jets are not only over a million light years long , they occupy an angular area over 200 times…
50 Years Ago: Yuri's Planet
On April 12th, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alexseyevich Gagarin became the first human in space. His remotely controlled Vostok 1 spacecraft lofted him to an altitude of 200 miles…
Otherworldly Planet Rise
What would a sunrise look like on another world? So far, humanity has only recorded sunrises on Mars and Earth , but it is fun to wonder what they would look like on planets known…
Sunspot Loops in Ultraviolet
It was a quiet day on the Sun . The above image shows, however, that even during off days the Sun's surface is a busy place. Shown in ultraviolet light , the relatively cool dark…
Viewing discoveries from 3 May 2011 through 10 April 2011.