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.
Auroras and the Magnetosphere of Jupiter
Jupiter has auroras. Like near the Earth, the magnetic field of our Solar System 's largest planet compresses when impacted by a gust of charged particles from the Sun . This…
Lucid Dreaming
Is this the real world? Or is it just fantasy ? The truth started with a dream -- a dream that the spectacular Seljarlandsfoss waterfall in southern Iceland could be photographed…
Close-up of the Bubble Nebula
It's the bubble versus the cloud. NGC 7635, the Bubble Nebula , is being pushed out by the stellar wind of massive central star BD+602522 . Next door, though, lives a giant…
Pluto's Bladed Terrain in 3D
Get out your red/blue glasses and gaze across a mountainous region informally known as Tartarus Dorsa. This scene sprawls some 300 kilometers (about 180 miles) across the…
Europa: Discover Life Under the Ice
Looking for an interplanetary vacation destination? Consider a visit to Europa , one of the Solar System's most tantalizing moons . Ice-covered Europa follows an elliptical path…
Big Dipper to Southern Cross
Welcome to an equatorial night. This remarkable 24 frame night skyscape was captured from Maba Beach on the Indonesian island of Halmahera during the evening of March 4. Seen from…
NGC 6188 and NGC 6164
Fantastic shapes lurk in clouds of glowing gas in the giant star forming region NGC 6188. The emission nebula is found about 4,000 light years away near the edge of a large…
Orion's Belt and Sword over Teide's Peak
The southern part of Orion, the famous constellation and mythical hunter, appears quite picturesque posing here over a famous volcano. Located in the Canary Islands off the…
NGC 6357: Cathedral to Massive Stars
How massive can a normal star be? Estimates made from distance, brightness and standard solar models had given one star in the open cluster Pismis 24 over 200 times the mass of…
Solstice to Equinox Cubed
This 3 month long exposure packed the days from December 22, 2015 through March 20 into a box. Dubbed a solargraph , the unconventional, unfolded picture was recorded with a…
Close Comet and the Milky Way
Comet 252P/Linear's lovely greenish coma is easy to spot in this expansive southern skyscape. Visible to the naked eye from the dark site near Flinders , Victoria, Australia, the…
Hickson 91 in Piscis Austrinus
Scanning the skies for galaxies, Canadian astronomer Paul Hickson and colleagues identified some 100 compact groups of galaxies , now appropriately called Hickson Compact Groups…
The Great Nebula in Carina
In one of the brightest parts of Milky Way lies a nebula where some of the oddest things occur. NGC 3372, known as the Great Nebula in Carina , is home to massive stars and…
Rainbow Airglow over the Azores
Why would the sky glow like a giant repeating rainbow? Airglow . Now air glows all of the time, but it is usually hard to see. A disturbance however -- like an approaching storm…
Alaskan Moondogs
What's happened to the sky? Moonlight illuminates a snowy scene in this night land and skyscape made on 2013 January from Lower Miller Creek, Alaska , USA . Overexposed near the…
A Picturesque Equinox Sunset
What's that at the end of the road? The Sun. Many towns have roads that run east - west, and on two days each year, the Sun rises and sets right down the middle . Today is one of…
3D Ahuna Mons
Get out your red/blue glasses and gaze across Ceres at mysterious mountain Ahuna Mons . Shown in a 3D anaglyph perspective view , the mosaicked image data was captured in December…
The W in Cassiopeia
A familiar, zigzag, W pattern in northern constellation Cassiopeia is traced by five bright stars in this colorful and broad mosaic. Stretching about 15 degrees across rich…
Close Comet and Large Magellanic Cloud
Sporting a surprisingly bright , lovely green coma Comet 252P/Linear poses next to the Large Magellanic Cloud in this southern skyscape. The stack of telephoto exposures was…
A Phoenix Aurora over Iceland
All of the other aurora watchers had gone home. By 3:30 am in Iceland , on a quiet night last September, much of that night's auroras had died down. Suddenly though, a new burst…
Dark Nebulas across Taurus
Sometimes even the dark dust of interstellar space has a serene beauty. One such place occurs toward the constellation of Taurus. The filaments featured here can be found on the…
Neon Saturn
If seen in the right light, Saturn glows like a neon sign. Although Saturn has comparatively little of the element neon , a composite image false-colored in three bands of…
The Flash Spectrum of the Sun
In a flash, the visible spectrum of the Sun changed from absorption to emission on March 9 during the total solar eclipse. That fleeting moment , at the beginning the total…
Lunar Shadow Transit
This snapshot from deep space captures planet Earth on March 9 . The shadow of its large moon is falling on the planet's sunlit hemisphere. Tracking toward the east (left to…
Viewing discoveries from 6 April 2016 through 11 March 2016.