Browse NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day archive by date and media: Archive Discoveries
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Glowing Elements in the Soul Nebula
Stars are forming in the Soul of the Queen of Aethopia. More specifically, a large star forming region called the Soul Nebula (IC 1898) can be found in the direction of the…
Active Prominences on a Quiet Sun
Why is the Sun so quiet? As the Sun enters into a period of time known as a Solar Minimum , it is, as expected, showing fewer sunspots and active regions than usual. The quietness…
Asperitas Clouds Over New Zealand
What kind of clouds are these? Although their cause is presently unknown, such unusual atmospheric structures, as menacing as they might seem, do not appear to be harbingers of…
Seeing Titan
Shrouded in a thick atmosphere, Saturn's largest moon Titan really is hard to see. Small particles suspended in the upper atmosphere cause an almost impenetrable haze, strongly…
Perseid Fireball and Persistent Train
Before local midnight on August 12 , this brilliant Perseid meteor flashed above the Poloniny Dark Sky Park, Slovakia, planet Earth. Streaking beside the summer Milky Way, its…
Parker vs Perseid
The brief flash of a bright Perseid meteor streaks across the upper right in this composited series of exposures made early Sunday morning near the peak of the annual Perseid…
Launch of the Parker Solar Probe
When is the best time to launch a probe to the Sun? The now historic answer -- which is not a joke because this really happened this past weekend -- was at night. Night, not only…
M86 in the Central Virgo Cluster
Is there a bridge of gas connecting these two great galaxies? Quite possibly, but it is hard to be sure. M86 on the upper left is a giant elliptical galaxy near the center of the…
The Pencil Nebula in Red and Blue
This shock wave plows through interstellar space at over 500,000 kilometers per hour. Near the top and moving up in this sharply detailed color composite, thin, bright, braided…
Meteor before Galaxy
What's that green streak in front of the Andromeda galaxy? A meteor. While photographing the Andromeda galaxy in 2016, near the peak of the Perseid Meteor Shower , a sand-sized…
Moon, Mars, and Milky Way
Just two weeks ago , dark skies over the desert in northern Iran held this alluring celestial vista. The dramatic digital mosaic finds the Moon and Mars alongside the Milky Way's…
Spiral Galaxy NGC 6744
Beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 6744 is nearly 175,000 light-years across, larger than our own Milky Way . It lies some 30 million light-years distant in the southern constellation…
Red Planet, Red Moon, and Mars
Mars is also known as The Red Planet , often seen with a reddish tinge in dark night skies. Mars shines brightly at the upper left of this gorgeous morning twilight view from…
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Animation: Perseid Meteor Shower
Where do Perseid meteors come from? Mostly small bits of stony grit, Perseid meteoroids were once expelled from Comet Swift-Tuttle and continue to follow this comet's orbit as…
Eclipsed Moon and Mars over Mountains
There is something unusual about this astronomically-oriented photograph. It's not obvious -- it was discovered only during post-processing. It is not the Moon , although…
Live: Cosmic Rays from Minnesota
Cosmic rays from outer space go through your body every second. Typically, they do you no harm. The featured image shows some of these fast moving particles as streaks going…
Trapezium: At the Heart of Orion
Near the center of this sharp cosmic portrait , at the heart of the Orion Nebula , are four hot, massive stars known as the Trapezium . Gathered within a region about 1.5…
Central Cygnus Skyscape
Supergiant star Gamma Cygni lies at the center of the Northern Cross , famous asterism in the constellation Cygnus the Swan. Known by its proper name, Sadr , the bright star also…
Central Lunar Eclipse
Reddened by scattered sunlight, the Moon in the center is passing through the center of Earth's dark umbral shadow in this July 27 lunar eclipse sequence . Left to right the three…
Eclipse over the Gulf of Poets
The total phase of the July 27 lunar eclipse lasted for an impressive 103 minutes. That makes it the longest total lunar eclipse of the 21st century . The Moon passed through the…
The Iris Nebula in a Field of Dust
What blue flower grows in this field of dark interstellar dust? The Iris Nebula . The striking blue color of the Iris Nebula is created by light from the bright star SAO 19158…
Layers of the South Pole of Mars
What lies beneath the layered south pole of Mars? A recent measurement with ground-penetrating radar from ESA's Mars Express satellite has detected a bright reflection layer…
Lunar Eclipse over Rio
Moonrise doesn't usually look this interesting. For one thing, the full moon is not usually this dark -- but last Friday the moon rose here as it simultaneously passed through the…
Journey to the Center of the Galaxy
What wonders lie at the center of our Galaxy? In Jules Verne's science fiction classic A Journey to the Center of the Earth, Professor Liedenbrock and his fellow explorers…
Viewing discoveries from 21 August 2018 through 29 July 2018.