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.
Little Planet to Exoplanets
Of course this little planet is really planet Earth in a digitally stitched 360 x 180 degree mosaic captured high in the Chilean Atacama desert. The seemingly large domes house…
A Harvest Moon
Famed in festival, story, and song the best known full moon is the Harvest Moon . For northern hemisphere dwellers that's a traditional name of the full moon nearest the September…
The Iris Nebula in a Field of Dust
These cosmic dust clouds drift some 1,300 light-years away along the fertile starfields of the constellation Cepheus. The beautiful Iris Nebula , also known as NGC 7023, blossoms…
IC 1805: The Heart Nebula
What energizes the Heart Nebula? First, the large emission nebula dubbed IC 1805 looks, in whole, like a human heart . The nebula glows brightly in red light emitted by its most…
Pluto in True Color
What color is Pluto, really? It took some effort to figure out. Even given all of the images sent back to Earth when the robotic New Horizons spacecraft sped past Pluto in 2015,…
M31: The Andromeda Galaxy
How far can you see? The most distant object easily visible to the unaided eye is M31, the great Andromeda Galaxy , over two million light-years away. Without a telescope, even…
In Wolf's Cave
The mysterious blue reflection nebula found in catalogs as VdB 152 or Ced 201 really is very faint. It lies at the tip of the long dark nebula Barnard 175 in a dusty complex that…
Recycling Cassiopeia A
Massive stars in our Milky Way Galaxy live spectacular lives. Collapsing from vast cosmic clouds, their nuclear furnaces ignite and create heavy elements in their cores. After a…
The Large Cloud of Magellan
The 16th century Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan and his crew had plenty of time to study the southern sky during the first circumnavigation of planet Earth. As a result,…
The Spider Nebula in Infrared
Will the spider ever catch the fly? Not if both are large emission nebulas toward the constellation of the Charioteer ( Auriga ). The spider -shaped gas cloud on the left is…
The Moon and Jupiter over the Alps
What are those bright lights in the sky ahead? When hiking a high mountain pass in northern Italy three weeks ago, a conjunction between our Moon and the distant planet Jupiter…
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…
Spitzer's Orion
Few cosmic vistas excite the imagination like the Orion Nebula , an immense stellar nursery some 1,500 light-years away. Spanning about 40 light-years across the region, this…
NGC 7129 and NGC 7142
This wide-field telescopic image looks toward the constellation Cepheus and an intriguing visual pairing of dusty reflection nebula NGC 7129 (right) and open star cluster NGC…
M27: Not a Comet
While hunting for comets in the skies above 18th century France, astronomer Charles Messier diligently kept a list of the things he encountered that were definitely not comets.…
Messier 61 Close Up
Image data from the Hubble Space Telescope , the European Southern Observatory, and small telescopes on planet Earth are combined in this magnificent portrait of face-on spiral…
Dark Dust and Colorful Clouds near Antares
Why is the sky near Antares and Rho Ophiuchi so dusty yet colorful? The colors result from a mixture of objects and processes. Fine dust illuminated from the front by starlight…
NGC 2170: Angel Nebula Still Life
Is this a painting or a photograph? In this classic celestial still life composed with a cosmic brush, dusty nebula NGC 2170 , also known as the Angel Nebula , shines near the…
Millions of Stars in Omega Centauri
Globular star cluster Omega Centauri , also known as NGC 5139, is some 15,000 light-years away. The cluster is packed with about 10 million stars much older than the Sun within a…
NGC 1499: The California Nebula
Drifting through the Orion Arm of the spiral Milky Way Galaxy, this cosmic cloud by chance echoes the outline of California on the west coast of the United States. Our own Sun…
Nearby Spiral Galaxy NGC 4945
Large spiral galaxy NGC 4945 is seen edge-on near the center of this cosmic galaxy portrait . In fact, it's almost the size of our Milky Way Galaxy . NGC 4945's own dusty disk,…
The Orion You Can Almost See
Do you recognize this constellation? Although it is one of the most recognizable star groupings on the sky, this is a more full Orion than you can see -- an Orion only revealed…
Lenticular Clouds over Mount Etna
What's happening above that volcano? Although Mount Etna is seen erupting, the clouds are not related to the eruption . They are lenticular clouds formed when moist air is forced…
Human as Spaceship
You are a spaceship soaring through the universe. So is your dog . We all carry with us trillions of microorganisms as we go through life. These multitudes of bacteria , fungi ,…
Viewing discoveries from 14 September 2019 through 18 August 2019.