Browse NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day archive by date and media: Archive Discoveries
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Lenticular Cloud, Moon, Mars, Venus
It is not every day that such an interesting cloud photobombs your image. The original plan was to photograph a rare angular conjunction of Mars and Venus that occurred a week and…
Inside the Coma Cluster of Galaxies
Almost every object in the above photograph is a galaxy. The Coma Cluster of Galaxies pictured above is one of the densest clusters known - it contains thousands of galaxies .…
Moon-Venus-Mars Skyline
Taken on February 20, five different exposures made in rapid succession were used to created this tantalizing telephoto image. In combination, they reveal a wide range of…
Long Lovejoy and Little Dumbbell
Buffeted by the solar wind, Comet Lovejoy's crooked ion tail stretches over 3 degrees across this telescopic field of view, recorded on February 20 . The starry background…
Love and War by Moonlight
Venus , named for the Roman goddess of love, and Mars , the war god's namesake, came together by moonlight in this lovely skyview, recorded on February 20 from Charleston, South…
The Rosette Nebula in Hydrogen and Oxygen
The Rosette Nebula is not the only cosmic cloud of gas and dust to evoke the imagery of flowers -- but it is the most famous. At the edge of a large molecular cloud in Monoceros,…
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Unusual Plumes Above Mars
What is creating unusual plumes on Mars? No one is sure . Noted and confirmed by a global contingent of amateur astronomers on photos of the red planet in March 2012, possibly…
The Milky Way Over the Arizona Toadstools
Which is older -- the rocks you see on the ground or the light you see from the sky? Usually its the rocks that are older, with their origin sediments deposited well before light…
The Dark River to Antares
Connecting the Pipe Nebula to the colorful region near bright star Antares is a dark cloud dubbed the Dark River , flowing from the picture's left edge. Murky looking, the Dark…
45 Days in the Sun
From January 11 to February 25 2013, a pinhole camera sat in a field near Budapest, Hungary, planet Earth to create this intriguing solargraph . And for 45 days, an old Antonov…
An Evening Sky Conjunction
Eight years ago, an evening sky held this lovely pairing of a young crescent Moon and brilliant Venus . Seen near the western horizon, the close conjunction and its wintry…
Palomar 12
Palomar 12 was not born here . The stars of the globular cluster, first identified in the Palomar Sky Survey , are younger than those in other globular star clusters that roam the…
Dark Craters and Bright Spots Revealed on Asteroid Ceres
What are those bright spots on asteroid Ceres? As the robotic spacecraft Dawn approaches the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt , the puzzle only deepens. Sharper new images…
Fibrils Flower on the Sun
When does the Sun look like a flower? In a specific color of red light emitted by hydrogen, as featured here , some regions of the solar chromosphere may resemble a rose . The…
M106: A Spiral Galaxy with a Strange Center
What's happening at the center of spiral galaxy M106? A swirling disk of stars and gas, M106 's appearance is dominated by blue spiral arms and red dust lanes near the nucleus, as…
Two Hours Before Neptune
Two hours before closest approach to Neptune in 1989, the Voyager 2 robot spacecraft snapped this picture . Clearly visible for the first time were long light-colored cirrus -type…
Solar System Portrait
On another Valentine's Day 25 years ago, cruising four billion miles from the Sun, the Voyager 1 spacecraft looked back one last time to make this first ever Solar System family…
Aurora on Ice
Not from a snowglobe, this expansive fisheye view of ice and sky was captured on February 1, from Jökulsárlón Beach , southeast Iceland, planet Earth. Chunks of glacial ice on the…
Exploring the Antennae
Some 60 million light-years away in the southerly constellation Corvus , two large galaxies are colliding . The stars in the two galaxies, cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039 ,…
M100: A Grand Design Spiral Galaxy
Majestic on a truly cosmic scale, M100 is appropriately known as a grand design spiral galaxy. It is a large galaxy of over 100 billion stars with well-defined spiral arms that is…
An Extremely Long Filament on the Sun
Yesterday, the Sun exhibited one of the longest filaments ever recorded. It may still be there today. Visible as the dark streak just below the center in the featured image, the…
Layered Rocks near Mount Sharp on Mars
What caused these Martian rocks to be layered? The leading hypothesis is an ancient Martian lake that kept evaporating and refilling over 10 million years -- but has now remained…
Carina Nebula Dust Pillar
This cosmic pillar of gas and dust is nearly two light-years wide. The structure lies within one of our galaxy's largest star forming regions, the Carina Nebula , shining in…
An Aurora of Marbles
It looks like a fine collection of aggies. But this grid of embedded swirls and streaks actually follows the dramatic development of planet Earth's auroral substorms . The…
Viewing discoveries from 2 March 2015 through 7 February 2015.