NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day

In today's image, we see the Dolphin Head Nebula which is the nebula around a young Wolf-Rayet star. These are some of the most massive stars and the type that are expected to become a supernova at t…

In today's image, we see an image of NGC 4565 which is a spiral galaxy like our own Milky Way. This galaxy is seen in an edge-on orientation giving it a very narrow appearance which is why its common…

In today's image, we see an image of the surface of Mars taken by the Perseverance Rover which has been exploring Mars since 2021. We can note the similarities to many desert areas on Earth with the …

In today's image, we see an image of comet Pons-Brooks which made its closest approach to Earth a couple of days ago and is heading back into the outer solar system We can see the two distinct tails …

In today's image, we see the spiral galaxy known as NGC 2403. This is a galaxy much like our own Milky Way in many ways and shows the distinct blue in the spiral arms from bright stars that have rece…

In today's image, we see the Moon in a short video put together from images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). This shows the near side of the Moon which always faces Earth, but also th…

In today's image, we see one of the moons of Saturn, Helene in a 3D image which can be viewed with the red-blue 3D glasses. This moon orbits in a Lagrange point formed by the gravitation of Saturn an…

In today's image, we see the region around the Wolf-Rayet star, WR 134. A Wolf-Rayet star is the type of star that is expected to become a supernova at the end of its short life. At that point, it wi…

In today's image, we see the Eiffel Tower in the foreground and the Moon above in the sky. Around the Moon, we see a lunar corona - this is a quantum mechanical effect caused by many rain drops which…

In today's image, we see a stairway leading up a mountain and apparently to the Milky Way in the sky! Of course, the Milky Way is far beyond anything here on Earth, but this does give us a striking v…

In today's image, we see an image from the Solar Dynamics Observatory showing the rotation of our Sun over the course of a day. Here were see the active region, AS 3446 as it returns around the limb …

In today's image, we see the Chameleon I Molecular Cloud which is a region of star formation visible in the southern sky. Here we see a number of dark nebulae as well as a couple of reflection nebula…

In today's image, we see a solar filament which erupted into a coronal mass ejection on the Sun back in 2012. The Sun has a cycle of activity that lasts about 11 years and is near the peak of that ac…

In today's image, we see the Manicouagan impact crater as seen from the International Space Station. The crater, about 100km across has worn down over the past 200 million years so that we just see t…

In today's image, we see the star forming region known as M78 as imaged in visible and infrared light from the Euclid Space Telescope. This telescope was launched last year and will be used to study …

In today's image, we see two galaxies in the process of colliding together. When galaxies collide, their gravitational fields interact so that material is pulled out in streams as we see around the g…

In today's image, we see an aurora from 2016 as seen over Sweden. The green color of the aurora is caused when charged particles from the Sun strike Earth's magnetic field and are funneled to the atm…

In today's image, we see what is known as a cemetery globule in the foreground. This is a region of star formation which is unrelated to comets in out solar system except for the rough appearance. We…

In today's image, we see an image of the aurora taken back on May 10 after the emission of a coronal mass ejection from the Sun by a large sunspot group crossing its face. That sunspot group has now …

In today's image, we see an animation created using data collected from the Juno spacecraft to simulate what it would be like to plunge into the upper atmosphere of Jupiter in the area around the Gre…