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.
Stars and Planets over Portugal
The mission was to document night-flying birds -- but it ended up also documenting a beautiful sky. The featured wide-angle mosaic was taken over the steppe golden fields in…
Shuttle Over Earth
What's that approaching? Astronauts on board the International Space Station in 2010 first saw it far in the distance. Soon it enlarged to become a dark silhouette . As it came…
Orion Pines
Taken with a camera fixed to a tripod, many short exposures were aligned with the stars to unveil this beautiful, dark night sky. Captured near the rural village of Albanya at the…
The Gator-Back Rocks of Mars
Wind-sharpened rocks known as ventifacts cover this broad sloping plain in the foot hills of Mount Sharp, Gale crater, Mars. Dubbed gator-back rocks their rugged, scaly appearance…
Messier 96
Spiral arms seem to swirl around the core of Messier 96 in this colorful, detailed portrait of a beautiful island universe . Of course M96 is a spiral galaxy , and counting the…
Milky Way over Devils Tower
What created Devils Tower? The origin of this extraordinary rock monolith in Wyoming , USA is still debated, with a leading hypothesis holding that it is a hardened lava plume…
N11: Star Clouds of the LMC
Massive stars, abrasive winds, mountains of dust , and energetic light sculpt one of the largest and most picturesque regions of star formation in the Local Group of Galaxies .…
A Space Station Crosses a Busy Sun
Typically, the International Space Station is visible only at night. Slowly drifting across the night sky as it orbits the Earth, the International Space Station (ISS) can be seen…
Shadows at the Moon's South Pole
Was this image of the Moon's surface taken with a microscope? No -- it's a multi-temporal illumination map made with a wide-angle camera. To create it, the Lunar Reconnaissance…
Mars-Saturn Conjunction
Fainter stars in the zodiacal constellation Capricornus are scattered near the plane of the ecliptic in this field of view. The two brightest ones at center aren't stars at all…
Hale-Bopp: The Great Comet of 1997
Only twenty-five years ago, Comet Hale-Bopp rounded the Sun and offered a dazzling spectacle in planet Earth's night skies. Digitized from the original astrophoto on 35mm color…
Messier 24: Sagittarius Star Cloud
Unlike most entries in Charles Messier's famous catalog of deep sky objects, M24 is not a bright galaxy, star cluster, or nebula. It's a gap in nearby, obscuring interstellar dust…
Earendel: A Star in the Early Universe
Is Earendel the farthest star yet discovered? This scientific possibility started when the Hubble Space Telescope observed a huge cluster of galaxies . The gravitational lens…
Seven Sisters versus California
On the upper right, dressed in blue, is the Pleiades . Also known as the Seven Sisters and M45 , the Pleiades is one of the brightest and most easily visible open clusters on the…
A Vortex Aurora over Iceland
No, the car was not in danger of being vacuumed into space by the big sky vortex. For one reason, the vortex was really an aurora , and since auroras are created by particles…
CMB Dipole: Speeding Through the Universe
Our Earth is not at rest. The Earth moves around the Sun . The Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way Galaxy . The Milky Way Galaxy orbits in the Local Group of Galaxies . The…
Nova Scotia Northern Lights
This almost otherworldly display of northern lights was captured in clear skies during the early hours of March 31 from 44 degrees north latitude, planet Earth. In a five second…
Leaning Tower, Active Sun
The natural filter of a hazy atmosphere offered this recognizable architecture and sunset telephoto view on March 27. Dark against the solar disk, large sunspots in solar active…
Exploring the Antennae
Some 60 million light-years away in the southerly constellation Corvus , two large galaxies are colliding. Stars in the two galaxies, cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039 , very…
Animation: Odd Radio Circles
What do you call a cosmic puzzle that no one expected to see? In this case, Odd Radio Circles, aka ORCs. ORC-1 typifies the enigmatic five objects, only visible at radio…
Venus and Mars: Passing in the Night
When two planets pass on the night sky, they can usually be seen near each other for a week or more. In the case of this planetary conjunction , Venus and Mars passed within 4…
Gems of a Maldivean Night
The southernmost part of the Milky Way contains not only the stars of the Southern Cross, but the closest star system to our Sun -- Alpha Centauri. The Southern Cross itself is…
Titan Seas Reflect Sunlight
Why would the surface of Titan light up with a blinding flash? The reason: a sunglint from liquid seas. Saturn's moon Titan has numerous smooth lakes of methane that, when the…
Pluto at Night
The night side of Pluto spans this shadowy scene . In the stunning spacebased perspective the Sun is 4.9 billion kilometers (almost 4.5 light-hours) behind the dim and distant…
Viewing discoveries from 18 April 2022 through 26 March 2022.