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.
Simulation: Two Black Holes Merge
Relax and watch two black holes merge. Inspired by the first direct detection of gravitational waves in 2015, this simulation plays in slow motion but would take about one third…
The Galaxy, the Jet, and a Famous Black Hole
Bright elliptical galaxy Messier 87 (M87) is home to the supermassive black hole captured in 2017 by planet Earth's Event Horizon Telescope in the first ever image of a black…
Visualization: A Black Hole Accretion Disk
What would it look like to circle a black hole? If the black hole was surrounded by a swirling disk of glowing and accreting gas, then the great gravity of the black hole would…
Black Hole Accreting with Jet
What happens when a black hole devours a star? Many details remain unknown, but observations are providing new clues. In 2014, a powerful explosion was recorded by the…
A Total Solar Eclipse from Sliver to Ring
This is how the Sun disappeared from the daytime sky last month. The featured time-lapse video was created from stills taken from Mountain View, Arkansas, USA on 2024 April 8.…
A Black Hole Disrupts a Passing Star
What happens to a star that goes near a black hole? If the star directly impacts a massive black hole , then the star falls in completely -- and everything vanishes. More likely ,…
3 ATs
Despite their resemblance to R2D2 , these three are not the droids you're looking for. Instead, the enclosures house 1.8 meter Auxiliary Telescopes (ATs) at Paranal Observatory in…
Temperatures on Exoplanet WASP-43b
A mere 280 light-years from Earth , tidally locked, Jupiter-sized exoplanet WASP-43b orbits its parent star once every 0.8 Earth days. That puts it about 2 million kilometers…
M100: A Grand Design Spiral Galaxy
Majestic on a truly cosmic scale, M100 is appropriately known as a grand design spiral galaxy. The large galaxy of over 100 billion stars has well-defined spiral arms, similar to…
IC 1795: The Fishhead Nebula
To some, this nebula looks like the head of a fish . However, this colorful cosmic portrait really features glowing gas and obscuring dust clouds in IC 1795, a star forming region…
GK Per: Nova and Planetary Nebula
The star system GK Per is known to be associated with only two of the three nebulas pictured . At 1500 light years distant, Nova Persei 1901 ( GK Persei ) was the second closest…
Comet, Planet, Moon
Three bright objects satisfied seasoned stargazers of the western sky just after sunset earlier this month. The most familiar was the Moon , seen on the upper left in a crescent…
Rings Around the Ring Nebula
The Ring Nebula (M57) is more complicated than it appears through a small telescope. The easily visible central ring is about one light-year across, but this remarkably deep…
All Sky Moon Shadow
If the Sun is up but the sky is dark and the horizon is bright all around, you might be standing in the Moon's shadow during a total eclipse of the Sun. In fact, the all-sky Moon…
Regulus and the Dwarf Galaxy
In northern hemisphere spring , bright star Regulus is easy to spot above the eastern horizon. The alpha star of the constellation Leo, Regulus is the spiky star centered in this…
NGC 604: Giant Stellar Nursery
Located some 3 million light-years away in the arms of nearby spiral galaxy M33 , giant stellar nursery NGC 604 is about 1,300 light-years across. That's nearly 100 times the size…
Dragon's Egg Bipolar Emission Nebula
How did a star form this beautiful nebula? In the middle of emission nebula NGC 6164 is an unusually massive star . The central star has been compared to an oyster's pearl and an…
Contrail Shadow X
What created this giant X in the clouds? It was the shadow of contrails . When airplanes fly, humid engine exhaust may form water droplets that might freeze in Earth's cold upper…
Moon and Smoke Rings from Mt. Etna
Yes, but can your volcano do this? To the surprise of some, Mt. Etna emits, on occasion, smoke rings. Technically known as vortex rings , the walls of the volcano slightly slow…
Perijove 16: Passing Jupiter
Watch Juno zoom past Jupiter. NASA's robotic spacecraft Juno is continuing on its now month-long, highly-elongated orbits around our Solar System's largest planet. The featured…
Diamonds in the Sky
When the dark shadow of the Moon raced across North America on April 8, sky watchers along the shadow's narrow central path were treated to a total solar eclipse. During the New…
The Great Carina Nebula
A jewel of the southern sky , the Great Carina Nebula is more modestly known as NGC 3372. One of our Galaxy's largest star forming regions, it spans over 300 light-years. Like the…
Facing NGC 1232
From our vantage point in the Milky Way Galaxy , we see NGC 1232 face-on. Nearly 200,000 light-years across, the big, beautiful spiral galaxy is located some 47 million…
Total Eclipse and Comets
Not one, but two comets appeared near the Sun during last week's total solar eclipse . The expected comet was Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks , but it was disappointingly dimmer than many…
Viewing discoveries from 10 May 2024 through 17 April 2024.