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.
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…
Electric Night
It may appear, at first, like the Galaxy is producing the lightning, but really it's the Earth. The featured nighttime landscape was taken from a southern tip of the Italian…
M27: The Dumbbell Nebula
Is this what will become of our Sun? Quite possibly. The first hint of our Sun 's future was discovered inadvertently in 1764 . At that time, Charles Messier was compiling a list…
Mercury Crosses a Quiet Sun
What's that black dot crossing the Sun? The planet Mercury. Mercury usually passes over or under the Sun, as seen from Earth, but last month the Solar System's innermost planet…
Starburst Galaxy M94 from Hubble
Why does this galaxy have a ring of bright blue stars? Beautiful island universe Messier 94 lies a mere 15 million light-years distant in the northern constellation of the Hunting…
Star Trails for a Red Planet
Does Mars have a north star ? In long exposures of Earth's night sky , star trails make concentric arcs around the north celestial pole, the direction of our fair planet's axis of…
Galileo's Europa Remastered
Looping through the Jovian system in the late 1990s, the Galileo spacecraft recorded stunning views of Europa and uncovered evidence that the moon's icy surface likely hides a…
Moon and Planets at Twilight
This week's ongoing conjunction of Venus and Jupiter may have whetted your appetite for skygazing. Tonight is the main course though. On November 28, a young crescent Moon will…
Hoag's Object: A Nearly Perfect Ring Galaxy
Is this one galaxy or two? This question came to light in 1950 when astronomer Arthur Hoag chanced upon this unusual extragalactic object. On the outside is a ring dominated by…
Venus and Jupiter on the Horizon
What are those two bright objects on the horizon? Venus and Jupiter . The two brightest planets in the night sky passed very close together -- angularly -- just two days ago. In…
NGC 6995: The Bat Nebula
Do you see the bat? It haunts this cosmic close-up of the eastern Veil Nebula . The Veil Nebula itself is a large supernova remnant, the expanding debris cloud from the death…
Apollo 12: Self-Portrait
Is this image art? 50 years ago, Apollo 12 astronaut-photographer Charles “Pete” Conrad recorded this masterpiece while documenting colleague Alan Bean 's lunar soil collection…
Apollo 12 and Surveyor 3 Stereo View
Put on your red/blue glasses and gaze across the western Ocean of Storms on the surface of the Moon. The 3D view features Apollo 12 astronaut Pete Conrad visiting the Surveyor 3…
Orion Rising
Looking toward the east in the early hours of a September morning this single exposure made with tripod and camera captured a simple visual experience. Rising above the tree-lined…
Simeis 147: Supernova Remnant
It's easy to get lost following the intricate looping filaments in this detailed image of supernova remnant Simeis 147. Also cataloged as Sharpless 2-240 it goes by the popular…
Arp 273: Battling Galaxies from Hubble
What's happening to these spiral galaxies? Although details remain uncertain , there sure seems to be a titanic battle going on. The upper galaxy is labelled UGC 1810 by itself,…
Milky Way over Uruguayan Lighthouse
Can a lighthouse illuminate a galaxy? No, but in the featured image, gaps in light emanating from the Jose Ignacio Lighthouse in Uruguay appear to match up nicely, although only…
Passing Asteroid Arrokoth
What would it look like to pass asteroid Arrokoth? The robotic New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past Arrokoth in January, 3.5 years after the spacecraft passed Pluto. If this…
Young Stars in the Rho Ophiuchi Cloud
How do stars form? To help find out, astronomers created this tantalizing false-color composition of dust clouds and embedded newborn stars in infrared wavelengths with WISE, the…
The Star Streams of NGC 5907
Grand tidal streams of stars seem to surround galaxy NGC 5907 . The arcing structures form tenuous loops extending more than 150,000 light-years from the narrow, edge-on spiral,…
M16 and the Eagle Nebula
A star cluster around 2 million years young surrounded by natal clouds of dust and glowing gas, M16 is also known as The Eagle Nebula. This beautifully detailed portrait of the…
Mercury and the Quiet Sun
On November 11, 2019 the Sun was mostly quiet, experiencing a minimum in its 11 year cycle of activity . In fact, the only spot visible was actually planet Mercury, making a…
Mercury in Silhouette
The small, dark, round spot in this solar close up is planet Mercury. In the high resolution telescopic image, a colorized stack of 61 sharp video frames, a turbulent array of…
NGC 3717: A Nearly Sideways Spiral Galaxy
Some spiral galaxies are seen nearly sideways. Most bright stars in spiral galaxies swirl around the center in a disk, and seen from the side, this disk can appear quite thin.…
Viewing discoveries from 5 December 2019 through 12 November 2019.