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 Gum Nebula Expanse
Named for a cosmic cloud hunter, Australian astronomer Colin Stanley Gum (1924-1960), The Gum Nebula is so large and close it is actually hard to see. In fact , we are only about…
Spiral Galaxy NGC 4038 in Collision
This galaxy is having a bad millennium. In fact, the past 100 million years haven't been so good, and probably the next billion or so will be quite tumultuous. Visible toward the…
Craters and Shadows at the Lunar Terminator
Why does the right part of this image of the Moon stand out? Shadows. The terminator line -- the line between light and dark -- occurs in the featured image so that just over half…
In the Heart of the Tarantula Nebula
In the heart of monstrous Tarantula Nebula lies huge bubbles of energetic gas, long filaments of dark dust, and unusually massive stars. In the center of this heart, is a knot of…
Reflections of Venus and Moon
Posing near the western horizon, a brilliant evening star and slender young crescent shared reflections in a calm sea last Thursday after sunset. Recorded in this snapshot from a…
Attack of the Laser Guide Stars
Dodging powerful laser beams , a drone captured this stunning aerial view. The confrontation took place above the 8.2 meter diameter Very Large Telescopes of the Paranal…
Milky Way vs Airglow Australis
Captured last week after sunset on a Chilean autumn night, an exceptional airglow floods this allsky view from Las Campanas Observatory. The airglow was so intense it diminished…
Rotation of the Large Magellanic Cloud
This image is not blurry. It shows in clear detail that the largest satellite galaxy to our Milky Way, the Large Cloud of Magellan (LMC), rotates. First determined with Hubble ,…
Kepler's House in Linz
Four hundred years ago today ( May 15, 1618 ) Johannes Kepler discovered the simple mathematical rule governing the orbits of the solar system's planets, now recognized as…
Saturn's Hyperion in Natural Color
What lies at the bottom of Hyperion 's strange craters? To help find out, the robot Cassini spacecraft that once orbited Saturn swooped past the sponge-textured moon in 2005 and…
Sakurajima Volcano with Lightning
Why does a volcanic eruption sometimes create lightning? Pictured above, the Sakurajima volcano in southern Japan was caught erupting in 2013 January. Magma bubbles so hot they…
A Plurality of Singularities at the Galactic Center
A recent informal poll found that astronomers don't yet have a good collective noun for a group of black holes, but they need one. The red circles in this Chandra Observatory…
NGC 1360: The Robin's Egg Nebula
This pretty cosmic cloud lies some 1,500 light-years away, it shape and color reminiscent of a blue robin's egg. It spans about 3 light-years, nested securely within the…
Galaxies in the River
Large galaxies grow by eating small ones. Even our own galaxy practices galactic cannibalism , absorbing small galaxies that get too close and are captured by the Milky Way's…
The Red Rectangle Nebula from Hubble
How was the unusual Red Rectangle nebula created? At the nebula's center is an aging binary star system that surely powers the nebula but does not, as yet, explain its colors. The…
The Observable Universe
How far can you see? Everything you can see, and everything you could possibly see, right now, assuming your eyes could detect all types of radiations around you -- is the…
The Unusual Boulder at Tycho's Peak
Why is there a large boulder near the center of Tycho's peak? Tycho crater on the Moon is one of the easiest features to see, visible even to the unaided eye (inset, lower right).…
Meteors, Planes, and a Galaxy over Bryce Canyon
Sometimes land and sky are both busy and beautiful. The landscape pictured in the foreground encompasses Bryce Canyon in Utah , USA , famous for its many interesting rock…
Stickney Crater
Stickney Crater, the largest crater on the martian moon Phobos, is named for Chloe Angeline Stickney Hall, mathematician and wife of astronomer Asaph Hall. Asaph Hall discovered…
The View Toward M101
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…
Opposite the Setting Sun
On April 30, a Full Moon rose opposite the setting Sun. Its yellowish moonglow silhouettes a low tree-lined ridge along Lewis Mountain in this northeastern Alabama skyscape.…
Moon Halo over Stone Circle
Have you ever seen a halo around the Moon ? This fairly common sight occurs when high thin clouds containing millions of tiny ice crystals cover much of the sky. Each ice crystal…
The Aurora and the Sunrise
On the International Space Station (ISS), you can only admire an aurora until the sun rises. Then the background Earth becomes too bright. Unfortunately, after sunset , the rapid…
Total Solar Eclipse Corona in HDR
How great was the Great American Eclipse ? The featured HDR image shows it to be perhaps greater than we knew. On August 21 of last year, the Moon blocked the Sun for a few…
Viewing discoveries from 24 May 2018 through 30 April 2018.