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.
The Sombrero Galaxy in Infrared
This floating ring is the size of a galaxy. In fact, it is a galaxy -- or at least part of one: the photogenic Sombrero Galaxy , one of the largest galaxies in the nearby Virgo…
A Blue Blood Moon
This sharp telescopic snapshot caught late September's Harvest Moon completely immersed in Earth's dark umbral shadow , at the beginning of a total lunar eclipse. It was the final…
Charon: Moon of Pluto
A darkened and mysterious north polar region informally known as Mordor Macula caps this premier high-resolution portrait of Charon, Pluto's largest moon . Captured by New…
Eclipsed in Southern Skies
This stunning panorama in southern skies was recorded on the colorful night of September 27/28 from Carnegie Las Campanas Observatory. A diffuse glow and dark rifts of the central…
Seasonal Streaks Point to Recent Flowing Water on Mars
What creates these changing streaks on Mars? Called Recurring Slope Linea (RSL), these dark features start on the slopes of hills and craters but don't usually extend to the…
Supermoon Total Lunar Eclipse and Lightning Storm
What's more rare than a supermoon total lunar eclipse? How about a supermoon total lunar eclipse over a lightning storm. Such an electrifying sequence was captured yesterday from…
Total Lunar Eclipse over Waterton Lake
Recorded in 2014 April, this total lunar eclipse sequence looks south down icy Waterton Lake from the Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta, Canada, planet Earth. The most…
M31 versus M33
Separated by about 14 degrees (28 Full Moons ) in planet Earth's sky, spiral galaxies M31 at left, and M33 are both large members of the Local Group , along with our own Milky Way…
Pluto's Snakeskin Terrain
A mountainous region informally known as Tartarus Dorsa sprawls some 530 kilometers (330 miles) across this Plutonian landscape . Recently downloaded from New Horizons , it…
LDN 988 and Friends
Stars are forming in dark, dusty molecular cloud LDN 988. Seen near picture center some 2,000 light-years distant, LDN 988 and other nearby dark nebulae were cataloged by Beverly…
Antarctic Analemma
Does the Sun return to the same spot on the sky every day? No. A better and more visual answer to that question is an analemma , a composite image taken from the same spot at the…
Milky Way over Bosque Alegre Station in Argentina
What are those streaks of light in the sky? First and foremost, the arching structure is the central band of our Milky Way galaxy . Visible in this galactic band are millions of…
Spiral Galaxy M96 from Hubble
Dust lanes seem to swirl around the core of Messier 96 in this colorful, detailed portrait of the center of a beautiful island universe . Of course M96 is a spiral galaxy , and…
Global Ocean Suspected on Saturn's Enceladus
Do some surface features on Enceladus roll like a conveyor belt ? A leading interpretation of images taken of Saturn's most explosive moon indicate that they do. This form of…
A Prominence on the Sun
This eerie landscape of incandescent plasma suspended in looping and twisted magnetic fields stretched toward the Sun's eastern horizon on September 16. Captured through a…
A Plutonian Landscape
This shadowy landscape of majestic mountains and icy plains stretches toward the horizon of a small, distant world. It was captured from a range of about 18,000 kilometers when…
Pickering's Triangle in the Veil
Chaotic in appearance, these filaments of shocked, glowing gas break across planet Earth's sky toward the constellation of Cygnus, as part of the Veil Nebula . The Veil Nebula…
Bright Spots Resolved in Occator Crater on Ceres
What created these bright spots on Ceres? The spots were first noted as the robotic Dawn spacecraft approached Ceres , the largest object in the asteroid belt , in February, with…
A Spiral Aurora over Iceland
What's happened to the sky? Aurora ! Captured late last month, this aurora was noted by Iceland ers for its great brightness and quick development. The aurora resulted from a…
Pluto from above Cthulhu Regio
New high resolution images of Pluto are starting to arrive from the outer Solar System. The robotic New Horizons spacecraft , which zoomed by Pluto in July , has finished sending…
A Partial Solar Eclipse over Texas
It was a typical Texas sunset except that most of the Sun was missing. The location of the missing piece of the Sun was not a mystery -- it was behind the Moon . Featured here is…
ISS Double Transit
Not once, but twice the International Space Station transits the Sun on consecutive orbits of planet Earth in this video frame composite. The scene was captured on August 22 from…
A Giant Squid in the Flying Bat
Very faint but also very large on planet Earth's sky, a giant Squid Nebula cataloged as Ou4, and Sh2-129 also known as the Flying Bat Nebula, are both caught in this scene toward…
NGC 4372 and the Dark Doodad
The delightful Dark Doodad Nebula drifts through southern skies , a tantalizing target for binoculars in the constellation Musca , The Fly. The dusty cosmic cloud is seen against…
Viewing discoveries from 4 October 2015 through 10 September 2015.