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.
Sand Dunes Thawing on Mars
What are these strange shapes on Mars? Defrosting sand dunes. As Spring dawned on the Northern Hemisphere of Mars, dunes of sand near the pole, as pictured here in late May by…
Equinox: The Sun from Solstice to Solstice
Today is an equinox, a date when day and night are equal. Tomorrow, and every day until the next equinox , the night will be longer than the day in Earth's northern hemisphere,…
Eye Sky a Dragon
What do you see when you look into this sky? In the center, in the dark, do you see a night sky filled with stars? Do you see a sunset to the left? Clouds all around? Do you see…
The Tulip in the Swan
Framing a bright emission region, this telescopic view looks out across a pretty field of stars along the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy, toward the nebula rich constellation…
Saturn at Night
Still bright in planet Earth's night skies, good telescopic views of Saturn and its beautiful rings often make it a star at star parties . But this stunning view of Saturn's rings…
Along the Western Veil
Delicate in appearance , these filaments of shocked, glowing gas, are draped across planet Earth's sky toward the constellation of Cygnus. They form the western part of the Veil…
Gigantic Jet Lightning over India
Yes, but can your lightning bolt do this? While flying from Munich to Singapore earlier this month, an industrious passenger took images of a passing lightning storm and caught…
Water Vapor Discovered on Distant Exoplanet
Where else might life exist? One of humanity's great outstanding questions, locating planets where extrasolar life might survive took a step forward recently with the discovery of…
A Lunar Corona over Turin
What are those colorful rings around the Moon? A corona . Rings like this will sometimes appear when the Moon is seen through thin clouds. The effect is created by the quantum…
A Long Storm System on Saturn
It was one of the largest and longest lived storms ever recorded in our Solar System. First seen in late 2010, the above cloud formation in the northern hemisphere of Saturn…
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…
Perijove 11: Passing Jupiter
Here comes Jupiter! NASA's robotic spacecraft Juno is continuing on its 53-day, highly-elongated orbits around our Solar System's largest planet. The featured video is from…
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…
Unusual Signal Suggests Neutron Star Destroyed by Black Hole
What created this unusual explosion? Three weeks ago, gravitational wave detectors in the USA and Europe -- the LIGO and Virgo detectors -- detected a burst of gravitational…
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…
Viewing discoveries from 24 September 2019 through 1 September 2019.