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.
Planet Earth at Twilight
No sudden, sharp boundary marks the passage of day into night in this gorgeous view of ocean and clouds over our fair planet Earth . Instead, the shadow line or terminator is…
Grand Spiral NGC 5643
Viewed face-on, grand spiral galaxy NGC 5643 has a festive appearance in this colorful cosmic portrait . Some 55 million light-years distant, the galaxy extends for over 100,000…
Diamond Dust Sky Eye
Why is there a huge eye in the sky? Diamond dust . That is an informal term for small ice crystals that form in the air and flitter to the ground. Because these crystals are…
Fox Fur, Cone, and Christmas Tree
What do the following things have in common: a cone, the fur of a fox, and a Christmas tree? Answer: they all occur in the constellation of the Unicorn ( Monoceros ). Considered…
Christmas Tree Aurora
It was December and the sky lit up like a Christmas tree. Shimmering, the vivid green, blue, and purple auroral colors that formed the tree-like apparition were caused by high…
The Local Fluff
The stars are not alone. In the disk of our Milky Way Galaxy , about 10 percent of visible matter is in the form of gas called the interstellar medium (ISM). The ISM is not…
A Year in Sunsets
A year in sunsets, from April 2023 to March 2024, track along the western horizon in these stacked panoramic views. The well-planned sequence is constructed of images recorded…
The Long Night Moon
On the night of December 15, the Full Moon was bright. Known to some as the Cold Moon or the Long Night Moon, it was the closest Full Moon to the northern winter solstice and the…
Messier 2
After the Crab Nebula , this giant star cluster is the second entry in 18th century astronomer Charles Messier's famous list of things that are not comets. M2 is one of the…
NGC 660: Polar Ring Galaxy
What kind of strange galaxy is this? This rare structure is known as a polar ring galaxy , and it seems to have two different rings of stars. In this galaxy, NGC 660 , one ring of…
Near to the Heart Nebula
What excites the Heart Nebula? First, the large emission nebula on the upper left, catalogued as IC 1805 , looks somewhat like a human heart . The nebula glows brightly in red…
A Kilometer High Cliff on Comet Churyumov - Gerasimenko
This kilometer high cliff occurs on the surface of a comet. It was discovered on the dark nucleus of Comet Churyumov - Gerasimenko (CG) by Rosetta , a robotic spacecraft launched…
Geminid Meteors over a Snowy Forest
Meteors have been flowing out from the constellation Gemini . This was expected, as mid-December is the time of the Geminid Meteor Shower . Pictured here, over two dozen meteors…
Apollo 17's Moonship
Awkward and angular looking, Apollo 17's lunar module Challenger was designed for flight in the near vacuum of space. Digitally enhanced and reprocessed, this picture taken from…
M51: Tidal Streams and H-alpha Cliffs
An intriguing pair of interacting galaxies, M51 is the 51st entry in Charles Messier's famous catalog. Perhaps the original spiral nebula , the large galaxy with whirlpool-like…
Phaethon's Brood
Based on its well-measured orbit, 3200 Phaethon (sounds like FAY-eh-thon) is recognized as the source of the meteoroid stream responsible for the annual Geminid meteor shower .…
The Shells and Jets of Galaxy Centaurus A
What's the closest active galaxy to planet Earth? That would be Centaurus A , cataloged as NGC 5128, which is only 12 million light-year s distant. Forged in a collision of two…
The Great Meteor Storm of 1833
It was a night of 100,000 meteors. The Great Meteor Storm of 1833 was perhaps the most impressive meteor event in recent history. Best visible over eastern North America during…
Pleiades: The Seven Sisters Star Cluster
Have you ever seen the Pleiades star cluster? Even if you have, you probably have never seen it as large and clear as this. Perhaps the most famous star cluster on the sky, the…
Aurora around Saturn's North Pole
Are Saturn's auroras like Earth's? To help answer this question, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Cassini spacecraft monitored Saturn's North Pole simultaneously during…
Rocket Engine Fireplace
You might not think a close up view of rocket engines producing 8.8 million pounds of thrust would be relaxing, but here it can be. In fact, you can get a warm and cozy feeling…
Xuyi Station and the Fireball
Colorful and bright, this streaking fireball meteor was captured in a single exposure taken at Purple Mountain (Tsuchinshan) Observatory's Xuyi Station in 2020, during planet…
Stereo Jupiter near Opposition
Jupiter looks sharp in these two rooftop telescope images . Both were captured last year on November 17 from Singapore, planet Earth, about two weeks after Jupiter's 2023…
Driveway Analemma
Does the Sun return to the same spot on the sky every day? No. A more visual answer is an analemma, a composite of sky images taken at the same time and from the same place over a…
Viewing discoveries from 27 December 2024 through 4 December 2024.