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.
Apollo 11: Catching Some Sun
Bright sunlight glints as long dark shadows mark this image of the surface of the Moon. It was taken on July 20, 1969, by Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first to walk on…
M83: The Southern Pinwheel
Beautiful and bright spiral galaxy M83 lies some twelve million light-years away, near the southeastern tip of the very long constellation Hydra. Prominent spiral arms traced by…
LDN 1295: The Giraffe Nebula
What does this image look like to you? Many see a giraffe facing right, with neck stretched high and long legs mid-stride (but some may see a squirrel instead). The featured image…
Preview unavailable
Open the archive entry to view the source media.
Witness XZ Andromedae Wink
Is this star winking at us? The central object in today’s animation is not one but two stars. XZ Andromedae, indicated by the bold lines, is an Algol-type eclipsing binary with a…
Hubble: Decagon Around Saturn's South Pole
Why are Saturn’s poles geometric? Saturn’s North Pole has been known to be surrounded by a hexagonal (6 sides) cloud since discovery in 1987 in data taken by NASA’s Voyager…
The Pelican Nebula in Gas, Dust, and Stars
The Pelican Nebula is slowly being transformed. IC 5070 (an official designation) is divided from the larger North America Nebula by a molecular cloud filled with dark dust. The…
Pluto in Enhanced Color
Pluto is more colorful than we can see. Color data and high-resolution images of our Solar System's most famous dwarf planet, taken by the robotic New Horizons spacecraft during…
Chasing the Moon's Shadow
Chasing the shadow of a New Moon, NASA’s WB-57F high altitude research aircraft took to the skies off the coast of Iceland on August 12 to observe a total solar eclipse. At 50,000…
Nā ʻUhane Māhoe Huki Pū i ke Ola
Nā ʻUhane Māhoe Huki Pū i ke Ola, is the Hawaiian name given to this image of a pair of spiral galaxies locked in a mutual gravitational embrace. Some 200 million light-years…
The Eclipse and the Stork
How do animals react to a total solar eclipse? The featured image shows a stork roosting on her nest in Poland at a partial phase of the recent total solar eclipse. If you are…
Solar Eclipses and Culture
Pretend you have never heard of a solar eclipse. The Sun’s behavior has been predictable your whole life. One day, you witness the sky transform as it does in today’s spliced…
A Plane Lunar Eclipse
Did you need to be on the right side of this airplane to see this eclipse? No. Lunar eclipses are routinely seen from the half of the Earth facing the Moon when the eclipse…
Preview unavailable
Open the archive entry to view the source media.
Launch of the Roman Space Telescope
A new telescope has been launched into space to study the universe. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (RST) has the same size main mirror as the Hubble Space Telescope (HST)…
M74: A Grand Design Spiral
If not the most grand, then this spiral galaxy is at least one of the most photogenic. An island universe of about 100 billion stars, 32 million light-years away toward the…
Eclipse Pair
Eclipses tend to come in pairs. Twice a year, during an eclipse season that lasts about 34 days, Sun, Moon, and Earth can nearly align. Then the new and full phases of the Moon,…
The Sky Turns Above Paranal
At the latitude of ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile, about 25 degrees south, Earth's rotation moves the planet's surface eastward at over 1,500 kilometers per hour. And while…
Colorful Aurora over Icelandic Waterfall
What a sight to behold, when a night sky became filled with colors that appeared to rain over the Skógafoss waterfall in Iceland. This image was taken in a single 5 second…
JWST Images The Lion's Head Nebula
Are we looking at the future of our Sun? The James Webb Space Telescope captured today’s composite image of the Lion’s Head Nebula (NGC 2392) with its NIRCam and MIRI instruments.…
Earth's Shadow Visualized with Lunar Eclipses
What’s creating this giant hole in space? This is not a black hole — it’s a shadow. It’s Earth’s shadow. Since at least the time of Aristotle, people have noted that Earth's dark…
Comet 220P in Outburst
Comet 220P is unexpectedly bright. Normally, periodic Comet 220P/McNaught is so dim that to see it requires a telescope. Two surprising outbursts this year, however, have made it…
Cassini Approaches Saturn
What would it look like to approach the grand planet Saturn? One doesn't have to just imagine -- the Cassini spacecraft did just this in 2004, recording thousands of images along…
Mostly Perseids
Recorded the night of August 12-13, images from four dedicated meteor-monitoring cameras at an astronomical observatory in Czechia were aligned and combined to create this…
Preview unavailable
Open the archive entry to view the source media.
Time Lapse of the Star S301 Orbiting the Black Hole in the Center of the Galaxy
What does it feel like to zoom around a spinning supermassive black hole? The featured video is an animation showing a time-lapse of 4 years of observations of the star S301…
The Elephant's Trunk in Cepheus
Like an illustration in a galactic Just So Story, the Elephant's Trunk Nebula winds through the emission region and young star cluster complex IC 1396, in the high and far off…
Viewing discoveries from 12 September 2026 through 20 August 2026.