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.
The Once and Future Stars of Andromeda
This picture of Andromeda shows not only where stars are now, but where stars will be. The big, beautiful Andromeda Galaxy , M31, is a spiral galaxy a mere 2.5 million light-years…
Edwin Hubble Discovers the Universe
How big is our universe? This question, among others , was debated by two leading astronomers in 1920 in what has since become known as astronomy's Great Debate . Many astronomers…
Ring of Fire over Monument Valley
Tracking along a narrow path, the shadow of a new moon will race across North, Central, and South America, on October 14. When viewed from the shadow path the apparent size of the…
IC 2118: The Witch Head Nebula
Does this nebula look like the head of a witch? The nebula is known popularly as the Witch Head Nebula because, it is said, the nebula's shape resembles a Halloween-style…
MyCn 18: The Engraved Hourglass Planetary Nebula
Do you see the hourglass shape -- or does it see you? If you can picture it, the rings of MyCn 18 trace the outline of an hourglass -- although one with an unusual eye in its…
Sprite Lightning in High Definition
Sometimes lightning occurs out near space. One such lightning type is red sprite lightning , which has only been photographed and studied on Earth over the past 25 years. The…
A Desert Eclipse
A good place to see a ring-of-fire eclipse, it seemed, would be from a desert. In a desert, there should be relatively few obscuring clouds and trees. Therefore late December of…
A Harvest Moon over Tuscany
For northern hemisphere dwellers, September's Full Moon was the Harvest Moon . Reflecting warm hues at sunset, it rises behind cypress trees huddled on a hill top in Tuscany,…
Back from Bennu
Back from asteroid 101955 Bennu , a 110-pound, 31-inch wide sample return capsule rests in a desert on planet Earth in this photo, taken at the Department of Defense Utah Test and…
The Deep Lagoon
Ridges of glowing interstellar gas and dark dust clouds inhabit the turbulent, cosmic depths of the Lagoon Nebula. Also known as M8, The bright star forming region is about 5,000…
STEVE and Milky Way Cross over Rural Road
Not every road ends in a STEVE. A week ago, a sky enthusiast's journey began with a goal: to photograph an aurora over Lake Huron . Driving through rural Ontario , Canada , the…
IC 4592: The Blue Horsehead Reflection Nebula
Do you see the horse's head? What you are seeing is not the famous Horsehead nebula toward Orion , but rather a fainter nebula that only takes on a familiar form with deeper…
Arp 142: The Hummingbird Galaxy
What's happening to this spiral galaxy? Just a few hundred million years ago, NGC 2936, the upper of the two large galaxies shown at the bottom, was likely a normal spiral galaxy…
A Ring of Fire Sunrise Solar Eclipse
What's rising above the horizon behind those clouds? It's the Sun. Most sunrises don't look like this, though, because most sunrises don't include the Moon. In the early morning…
Afternoon Analemma
An analemma is that figure-8 curve you get when you mark the position of the Sun at the same time each day for one year. To make this one, a 4x5 pinhole camera was set up looking…
Cosmos in Reflection
During the day , over 12,000 large mirrors reflect sunlight at the 100-megawatt, molten-salt, solar thermal power plant at the western edge of the Gobi desert near Dunhuang ,…
Tagging Bennu
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft's arm reached out and touched asteroid 101955 Bennu on October 20 , 2020, after a careful approach to the small, near-Earth asteroid's boulder-strewn…
Methane 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 in 2019 with the discovery of…
HH 211: Jets from a Forming Star
Do stars always create jets as they form? No one is sure. As a gas cloud gravitationally contracts , it forms a disk that can spin too fast to continue contracting into a…
The Red Sprite and the Tree
The sprite and tree could hardly be more different. To start, the red sprite is an unusual form of lightning, while the tree is a common plant . The sprite is far away -- high in…
Moon Mountains Magnified during Ring of Fire Eclipse
What are those dark streaks in this composite image of a solar eclipse? They are reversed shadows of mountains at the edge of the Moon. The center image, captured from Xiamen ,…
Fireball over Iceland
On September 12, from a location just south of the Arctic Circle, stones of Iceland's modern Arctic Henge point skyward in this startling scene. Entertaining an intrepid group of…
Venus, Moon, and the Smoking Mountain
Venus has returned , now appearing in planet Earth's predawn skies as a brilliant morning star . From a window seat on a flight to Mexico City, the bright celestial beacon was…
NGC 7331 and Beyond
Big, beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 7331 is often touted as an analog to our own Milky Way . About 50 million light-years distant in the northern constellation Pegasus , NGC 7331 was…
Viewing discoveries from 7 October 2023 through 14 September 2023.