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.
An Unusual Mountain on Asteroid Ceres
What created this large mountain on asteroid Ceres? No one is yet sure. As if in anticipation of today being Asteroid Day on Earth, the robotic spacecraft Dawn in orbit around…
Sunspot Group AR 2339 Crosses the Sun
How do sunspots evolve? Large dark sunspots -- and the active regions that contain them -- may last for weeks, but all during that time they are constantly changing. Such…
All the Colors of the Sun
It is still not known why the Sun's light is missing some colors. Here are all the visible colors of the Sun , produced by passing the Sun's light through a prism -like device.…
Stars of a Summer's Triangle
Rising at the start of a northern summer's night, these three bright stars form the familiar asterism known as the Summer Triangle . Altair, Deneb, and Vega are the alpha stars of…
Planet Aurora
What bizarre alien planet is this ? It's planet Earth of course, seen through the shimmering glow of aurorae from the International Space Station . About 400 kilometers (250…
Star Trails above Table Mountain
Stars trail above and urban lights sprawl below in this moonlit nightscape from Cape Town, South Africa, planet Earth . The looming form of Table Mountain almost seems to hold…
Triple Conjunction Over Galician National Park
What are those bright objects hovering over the horizon? Planets -- and the Moon. First out, the horizon featured is a shoreline of the Atlantic Ocean that occurs at the Galicia…
Sharpless 308: Star Bubble
Blown by fast winds from a hot, massive star, this cosmic bubble is huge. Cataloged as Sharpless 2-308 it lies some 5,200 light-years away toward the constellation of the Big Dog…
New Horizons
In three weeks, the robotic New Horizons spacecraft will reach Pluto. As the featured video makes clear, though, humanity has been on an unprecedented epoch of robotic exploration…
Rings and Seasons of Saturn
On Saturn, the rings tell you the season. On Earth, today marks a solstice , the time when the Earth's spin axis tilts directly toward the Sun. On Earth's northern hemisphere,…
Hubble's Messier 5
“Beautiful Nebula discovered between the Balance [Libra] & the Serpent [Serpens] ...” begins the description of the 5th entry in 18th century astronomer Charles Messier's famous…
LightSail A
Hitching a ride to low Earth orbit, LightSail A accomplished a challenging test mission, unfurling its 32 square meter mylar solar sail on June 7. This dramatic image from one of…
M64: The Black Eye Galaxy
This big, bright, beautiful spiral galaxy is Messier 64 , often called the Black Eye Galaxy or the Sleeping Beauty Galaxy for its heavy-lidded appearance in telescopic views. M64…
M45: The Pleiades Star Cluster
Have you ever seen the Pleiades star cluster? Even if you have, you probably have never seen it as dusty as this. Perhaps the most famous star cluster on the sky, the bright stars…
APOD is 20 Years Old Today
Welcome to the vicennial year of the Astronomy Picture of the Day! Perhaps a source of web consistency for some, APOD is still here. As during each of the 20 years of selecting…
A Colorful Lunar Corona
What are those colorful rings around the Moon? A corona. Rings like this will sometimes appear when the Moon is seen through thin clouds. The effect is created by the quantum…
M101: The Pinwheel Galaxy
Why do many galaxies appear as spirals ? A striking example is M101 , shown above , whose relatively close distance of about 27 million light years allows it to be studied in some…
1000 Sols
Shortly before Mars' June 2015 conjunction, the Curiosity Rover celebrated 1000 sols on the red planet . After its August 5, 2012 landing, Curiosity's 1000th sol or martian day on…
The Medusa Nebula
Braided, serpentine filaments of glowing gas suggest this nebula's popular name, The Medusa Nebula. Also known as Abell 21, this Medusa is an old planetary nebula some 1,500…
The Light, the Dark, and the Dusty
This colorful skyscape spans about three full moons (1.5 degrees) across nebula rich starfields along the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy in the royal northern constellation Cepheus…
Fly Over Dwarf Planet Ceres
What would it look like to fly over dwarf planet Ceres? Animators from the German Aerospace Center recently took actual images and height data from NASA's robotic Dawn mission --…
Galaxy NGC 7714 After Collision
Is this galaxy jumping through a giant ring of stars? Probably not. Although the precise dynamics behind the featured image is yet unclear, what is clear is that the pictured…
The Milky Way over the Temple of Poseidon
What's that glowing in the distance? Although it may look like a lighthouse , the rays of light near the horizon actually emanate from the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion ,…
NGC 3132: The Eight Burst Nebula
It's the dim star, not the bright one, near the center of NGC 3132 that created this odd but beautiful planetary nebula . Nicknamed the Eight-Burst Nebula and the Southern Ring…
Viewing discoveries from 30 June 2015 through 7 June 2015.