NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day

In today's image, we see the Butterfly Nebula as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. This is an example of a planetary nebula which is the end state of a star much like our own Sun. The core will c…

In today's image, we see the airglow in ripples over Tibet. The airglow is similar to the aurora but is caused by chemiluminesence in the atmosphere and is visible all around the Earth instead of jus…

In today's image, we see Artemis 1 lifting off from Earth and heading towards our Moon. It is scheduled to pass close to our Moon on November 21 before going into a retrograde orbit. The Orion craft …

In today's image, we see an image from the James Webb Space Telescope looking at the dark nebula L1527. Within the central dust disk between the two lobes is a protostar that is in the process of for…

In today's image, we see our planet Earth as seen yesterday from the Orion spacecraft as it travels to our Moon. This mission is a part of NASA's deep space exploration systems which will hopefully a…

In today's image, we see the spiral galaxy known by the catalog designation of NGC 1097. The galaxy shows the distinct blue spiral arms and pink glow of hydrogen associated with recently formed stars…

In today's image, we see Wolf's Cave Nebula. This is a region of space containing different types of nebulae, including a reflection nebula, a dark nebula, a planetary nebula, and a supernova remnant…

In today's image, we see the Wizard Nebula, also known as NGC 7390. This is an example of a star forming region where the young stars not only illuminate the gas but also shape the gas with their pow…

In today's image, we see, not a UFO, but the crash of the Genesis capsule in the Utah Desert. This craft was returning from collecting particles from the solar wind for analysis on Earth when the par…

In today's image, we see the skyline of New York City and above in the sky, we see the eclipsed Moon, the Pleiades star cluster, the bright star Sirius, the planet Mars. We also see the constellation…

In today's image, we see the fully eclipsed Moon just before it passes in front of the ice giant known as Uranus. This is an example of an occultation when is when one astronomical object passes dire…

In today's image, we see three images from the total lunar eclipse of November 8 of this year. The middle image is of the deeper part of the eclipse when Moon was furthest into Earth's shadow. The ot…

In today's image, we see Wolf-Rayet star 18 and its surrounding nebula. The nebula is asymmetric - brighter to the upper right and fainter to the lower left. While this was originally believed to be …

In today's image, we see Wild's Triplet which contains three spiral galaxies which appear to be interacting with each other. However, it has been found that only the two larger galaxies (with the bri…

In today's image, we see a video showing a total lunar eclipse which was visible from Tajikistan in 2011. A lunar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes into Earth's shadow and becomes dim and red. Anot…

In today's image, we see our Sun in an image taken in the light of hydrogen, converted to black and white and then inverted to give a negative image. This is then placed on a negative image of a fiel…

In today's image, we see a lunar eclipse as observed at the South Pole telescopes from May of this year. In the deepest part of the eclipse, the Moon appears a blood red color as light is bent by Ear…

In today's image, we see a selfie taken by the InSight lander on Mars. The mission of this lander is to study the interior of Mars through seismic waves from marsquakes. This allows us to determine w…

In today's image, we see the nearby spiral galaxy known as the Triangulum Galaxy or M33. This is one of the three spiral galaxies which dominate out local group of galaxies which also includes our Mi…

In today's image, we see our Moon moving in front of the Sun during the recent partial eclipse. The Moon moves in front of the Sun and blocks out some of the Sun's light. We also see a solar prominen…