NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day

In today's image, we see the Aurora Australis which is the aurora when seen in the southern hemisphere. That cause is exactly the same as the aurora seen in the Northern Hemisphere. The aurora have b…

In today's image, we see some of the auroral displays as seen over Georgia in the United States just about a week ago. The strong auroral displays were caused by the large sunspot group on the Sun wh…

In today's image, we see the large sunspot region known as AR 3664 as it moves around the limb of the Sun. The large prominence is larger than Earth and is now easily visible when seen against the da…

In today's image, we see a small open cluster of stars. Some of the brighter stars seem to form the number 37 in the sky. While 42 may have been more appropriate for this who have read The Hitchhiker…

In today's image, we see the large sunspot group known as AR 3664 which has been very active recently, sending solar flares and coronal mass ejection in the direction of Earth and giving up so beauti…

In today's image, we see the red aurora as observed over Poland. The aurora have been especially strong the past couple of days because of the numerous coronal mass ejections from the large sunspot g…

In today's image, we see the giant sunspot group AR 3664 which is currently crossing the face of the Sun. Sunspots are active regions on the Sun, slightly cooler than the surrounding surface. They ar…

In today's image, we see a simulation showing the merger of two black holes. This simulation depicts what would have been happening during the first detection of gravitational waves in 2015. As the b…

In today's image, we see the giant elliptical galaxy, M87. In addition, we see images of the central jets and the famous image from 2017 by the Event Horizon Telescope of the supermassive black hole …

In today's image, we see an animation which shows the central regions around a black hole including the accretion disk. The 15-second video allows us to look at this from different orientations to se…

In today's image, we see an artist's conception of an event observed in 2014. A massive explosion was observed which has since been modeled as a star being ripped apart by a supermassive black hole. …

In today's image, we see time-lapse of the total solar eclipse of April 8 of this year. We will see the Moon appear in the lower right and move to full cover the Sun, allowing us to see the solar cor…

In today's image, we see an artist's conception of what would happen as a black hole tears apart a passing star. Once the material crosses the event horizon, nothing can be known about it. However, m…

In today's image, we see three Auxiliary Telescopes which are used with the VLT telescopes to simulate larger mirrors using interferometry. This allows observations from different telescope to be com…

In today's image, we see an illustration of the orbit of the exoplanet WASP-43b. This is a nearby planet, less than 300 light years from Earth. It is an example of a "Hot Jupiter" - a large planet wh…

In today's image, we see the spiral galaxy known as M100 - this is an example of what is called a grand design spiral galaxy for its majestic spiral arms. We not the blue and pink color of the spiral…

In today's image, we see the star forming region known as the Fishhead Nebula and also by its catalog designation of IC 1795. This region has been images using the Hubble Palette of colors which look…

In today's image, we see GK Per which was seen to explode as a nova back in 1901. A nova occurs when material builds up on the surface of a white dwarf star and becomes sufficient for thermonuclear r…

In today's image, we see the comet known as Pons-Brooks which has no rounded the Sun and is beginning its journey back to the outer solar system. In addition, we see a thin crescent moon and the two …

In today's image, we see a very deep image of the Ring Nebula as observed by multiple large telescopes. This allows for the imaging of fainter rings around the traditional Ring Nebula we normally obs…