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.
Firing Lasers to Tame the Sky
Why do stars twinkle? Our atmosphere is to blame as pockets of slightly off-temperature air, in constant motion, distort the light paths from distant astronomical objects.…
Flashes of the Crab Pulsar
It somehow survived an explosion that would surely have destroyed our Sun. Now it is spins 30 times a second and is famous for the its rapid flashes. It is the Crab Pulsar, the…
WR23 and Interstellar Clouds in Carina
Stars can be like artists. With interstellar gas as a canvas, a massive and tumultuous Wolf-Rayet star has created the picturesque ruffled half-circular filaments called WR23, on…
Blue Straggler Stars in Globular Cluster M53
If our Sun were part of this star cluster, the night sky would glow like a jewel box of bright stars. This cluster, known as M53 and cataloged as NGC 5024, is one of about 250…
A Northern Winter Night
Snow blankets the ground in this serene forest and sky view. Assembled in a 360 degree panoramic projection, the mosaicked frames were captured at January's end along a quiet…
Apollo 14 Heads for Home
Fifty years ago this Sunday (February 7, 1971), the crew of Apollo 14 left lunar orbit and headed for home . They watched this Earthrise from their command module Kitty Hawk. With…
Apollo 14: A View from Antares
Fifty years ago this Friday, Apollo 14's Lunar Module Antares landed on the Moon. Toward the end of the stay astronaut Ed Mitchell snapped a series of photos of the lunar surface…
Found on the Moon: Candidate for Oldest Known Earth Rock
Was the oldest known rock on Earth found on the Moon? Quite possibly. The story opens with the Apollo 14 lunar mission. Lunar sample 14321, a large rock found in Cone crater) by…
A Colorful Quadrantid Meteor
Meteors can be colorful. While the human eye usually cannot discern many colors, cameras often can. Pictured is a Quadrantids meteor captured by camera over Missouri , USA , early…
Lunar Halo over Snowy Trees
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…
Asteroids in the Distance
Rocks from space hit Earth every day. The larger the rock, though, the less often Earth is struck. Many kilograms of space dust pitter to Earth daily. Larger bits appear initially…
Southern Sky from 38,000 Feet
Celestial sights of the southern sky shine above a cloudy planet Earth in this gorgeous night sky view. The scene was captured from an airliner's flight deck at 38,000 feet on a…
North American Nightscape
On January 21, light from the Moon near first quarter illuminated the foreground in this snowy mountain and night scene. Known as The Lions, the striking pair of mountain peaks…
Messier 66 Close Up
Big, beautiful spiral galaxy Messier 66 lies a mere 35 million light-years away . The gorgeous island universe is about 100 thousand light-years across, similar in size to the…
The Vertical Magnetic Field of NGC 5775
How far do magnetic fields extend up and out of spiral galaxies? For decades astronomers knew only that some spiral galaxies had magnetic field s. However, after NRAO 's Very…
Central NGC 1316: After Galaxies Collide
How did this strange-looking galaxy form? Astronomers turn detectives when trying to figure out the cause of unusual jumbles of stars, gas, and dust like NGC 1316. Inspection…
Southern Cross over Chilean Volcano
Have you ever seen the Southern Cross? This famous four-star icon is best seen from Earth's Southern Hemisphere. The featured image was taken last month in Chile and captures the…
Massive Nearby Spiral Galaxy NGC 2841
It is one of the more massive galaxies known. A mere 46 million light-years distant, spiral galaxy NGC 2841 can be found in the northern constellation of Ursa Major . This sharp…
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 Milky Ring
An expanse of cosmic dust, stars and nebulae along the plane of our Milky Way galaxy form a beautiful ring in this projected all-sky view . The creative panorama covers the entire…
M78 Wide Field
Interstellar dust clouds and glowing nebulae abound in the fertile constellation of Orion . One of the brightest, M78 , is centered in this colorful, wide field view , covering an…
The Magnetic Field of the Whirlpool Galaxy
Do magnetic fields always flow along spiral arms? Our face-on view of the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) allows a spectacularly clear view of the spiral wave pattern in a disk-shaped…
A Lunar Corona with Jupiter and Saturn
Why does a cloudy moon sometimes appear colorful? The effect , called a lunar corona , is created by the quantum mechanical diffraction of light around individual, similarly-sized…
The Medulla Nebula Supernova Remnant
What powers this unusual nebula? CTB-1 is the expanding gas shell that was left when a massive star toward the constellation of Cassiopeia exploded about 10,000 years ago. The…
Viewing discoveries from 10 February 2021 through 18 January 2021.