Astronomy Picture of the Day

🌌Dust and the Western Veil Nebula It's so big it is easy to miss. The entire Veil Nebula spans six times the diameter of the full moon, but is so dim you need binoculars to see it. The nebula was created about 15,000 years ago when a star in the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus) exploded. The spectacular explosion would have appeared brighter than even Venus for a week - but there is no known r ...

🌌PDS 70: Disk, Planets, and Moons It's not the big ring that's attracting the most attention. Although the big planet-forming ring around the star PDS 70 is clearly imaged and itself quite interesting. It's also not the planet on the right, just inside the big disk, that’s being talked about the most. Although the planet PDS 70c is a newly formed and, interestingly, similar in size and mass to J ...

© Jerry Zhang (left), Baolong Chen (photographer) & Amber Zhang (right)

🌌Eclipse Rings She knew everything but the question. She was well aware that there would be a complete annular eclipse of the Sun visible from their driving destination: Lake Abert in Oregon. She knew that the next ring-of-fire eclipse would occur in the USA only in 16 more years, making this a rare photographic opportunity. She was comfortable with the plan: that she and her boyfriend would app ...

© Shawn Wyre

🌌An Eclipse Tree Yes, but can your tree do this? If you look closely at the ground in the featured image, you will see many images of yesterday's solar eclipse -- created by a tree. Gaps between tree leaves act like pinhole lenses and each create a small image of the partially eclipsed Sun visible in the other direction. The image was taken in Burleson, Texas, USA. Yesterday, people across the A ...

© Vincenzo Mirabella

🌌Circular Sun Halo Want to see a ring around the Sun? It's easy to do in daytime skies around the world. Created by randomly oriented ice crystals in thin high cirrus clouds, circular 22 degree halos are visible much more often than rainbows. This one was captured by smart phone photography on May 29, 2021 near Rome, Italy. Carefully blocking the Sun, for example with a finger tip, is usually al ...

© Reinhold Wittich

🌌Hydrogen Clouds of M33 Gorgeous spiral galaxy Messier 33 seems to have more than its fair share of glowing hydrogen gas. A prominent member of the local group of galaxies, M33 is also known as the Triangulum Galaxy and lies a mere 3 million light-years away. The galaxy's central 30,000 light-years or so are shown in this sharp galaxy portrait. The portrait features M33's reddish ionized hydroge ...

© David Cruz

🌌Mu Cephei Mu Cephei is a very large star. An M-class supergiant some 1500 times the size of the Sun, it is one of the largest stars visible to the unaided eye, and even one of the largest in the entire Galaxy. If it replaced the Sun in our fair Solar System, Mu Cephei would easily engulf Mars and Jupiter. Historically known as Herschel's Garnet Star, Mu Cephei is extremely red. Approximately 28 ...

🌌NGC 1097: Spiral Galaxy with Supernova What's happening in the lower arm of this spiral galaxy? A supernova. Last month, supernova SN 2023rve was discovered with UAE's Al-Khatim Observatory and later found to be consistent with the death explosion of a massive star, possibly leaving behind a black hole. Spiral galaxy NGC 1097 is a relatively close 45 million light years away and visible with a ...

🌌Hidden Orion from Webb The Great Nebula in Orion has hidden stars. 🔗 https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap231010.html

© Elias Chasiotis

🌌A Distorted Sunrise Eclipse Yes, but have you ever seen a sunrise like this? Here, after initial cloudiness, the Sun appeared to rise in two pieces and during a partial eclipse in 2019, causing the photographer to describe it as the most stunning sunrise of his life. The dark circle near the top of the atmospherically-reddened Sun is the Moon -- but so is the dark peak just below it. This is be ...

© Doyle and Shannon Slifer

🌌Plane, Clouds, Moon, Spots, Sun What's that in front of the Sun? The closest object is an airplane, visible just below the Sun's center and caught purely by chance. Next out are numerous clouds in Earth's atmosphere, creating a series of darkened horizontal streaks. Farther out is Earth's Moon, seen as the large dark circular bite on the upper right. Just above the airplane and just below the S ...

🌌The Once and Future Stars of Andromeda This picture of Andromeda shows not only where stars are now, but where stars will be. The big, beautiful Andromeda Galaxy, M31, is a spiral galaxy a mere 2.5 million light-years away. Image data from space-based and ground-based observatories have been combined here to produce this intriguing composite view of Andromeda at wavelengths both inside and outs ...

© Carnegie Institution for Science

🌌Edwin Hubble Discovers the Universe How big is our universe? This question, among others, was debated by two leading astronomers in 1920 in what has since become known as astronomy's Great Debate. Many astronomers then believed that our Milky Way Galaxy was the entire universe. Many others, though, believed that our galaxy was just one of many. In the Great Debate, each argument was detailed, b ...

© Tunc Tezel

🌌Ring of Fire over Monument Valley Tracking along a narrow path, the shadow of a new moon will race across North, Central, and South America, on October 14. When viewed from the shadow path the apparent size of the lunar disk will not quite completely cover the Sun though. Instead, the moon in silhouette will appear during the minutes of totality surrounded by a fiery ring, an annular solar ecli ...

© Abdullah Alharbi

🌌IC 2118: The Witch Head Nebula Does this nebula look like the head of a witch? The nebula is known popularly as the Witch Head Nebula because, it is said, the nebula's shape resembles a Halloween-style caricature of a witch's head. Exactly how, though, can be a topic of imaginative speculation. What is clear is that IC 2118 is about 50 light-years across and made of gas and dust that points to ...

© NASA, ESA, Hubble, HLA; Processing & Copyright: Harshwardhan Pathak

🌌MyCn 18: The Engraved Hourglass Planetary Nebula Do you see the hourglass shape -- or does it see you? If you can picture it, the rings of MyCn 18 trace the outline of an hourglass -- although one with an unusual eye in its center. Either way, the sands of time are running out for the central star of this hourglass-shaped planetary nebula. With its nuclear fuel exhausted, this brief, spectacula ...

© Nicolas Escurat

🌌Sprite Lightning in High Definition Sometimes lightning occurs out near space. One such lightning type is red sprite lightning, which has only been photographed and studied on Earth over the past 25 years. The origins of all types of lightning remain topics for research, and scientists are still trying to figure out why red sprite lightning occurs at all. Research has shown that following a pow ...

© Maxime Daviron

🌌A Desert Eclipse A good place to see a ring-of-fire eclipse, it seemed, would be from a desert. In a desert, there should be relatively few obscuring clouds and trees. Therefore late December of 2019, a group of photographers traveled to the United Arab Emirates and Rub al-Khali, the largest continuous sand desert in world, to capture clear images of an unusual eclipse that would be passing ove ...

© Antonio Tartarini

🌌A Harvest Moon over Tuscany For northern hemisphere dwellers, September's Full Moon was the Harvest Moon. Reflecting warm hues at sunset, it rises behind cypress trees huddled on a hill top in Tuscany, Italy in this telephoto view from September 28. Famed in festival, story, and song, Harvest Moon is just the traditional name of the full moon nearest the autumnal equinox. According to lore the ...

🌌Back from Bennu Back from asteroid 101955 Bennu, a 110-pound, 31-inch wide sample return capsule rests in a desert on planet Earth in this photo, taken at the Department of Defense Utah Test and Training Range near Salt Lake City last Sunday, September 24. Dropped off by the OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft, the capsule looks charred from the extreme temperatures experienced during its blistering descent ...

© Josep Drudis

🌌The Deep Lagoon Ridges of glowing interstellar gas and dark dust clouds inhabit the turbulent, cosmic depths of the Lagoon Nebula. Also known as M8, The bright star forming region is about 5,000 light-years distant. It makes for a popular stop on telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius toward the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. Dominated by the telltale red emission of ionized hydroge ...

© Theresa Clarke

🌌STEVE and Milky Way Cross over Rural Road Not every road ends in a STEVE. A week ago, a sky enthusiast's journey began with a goal: to photograph an aurora over Lake Huron. Driving through rural Ontario, Canada, the forecasted sky show started unexpectedly early, causing the photographer to stop before arriving at the scenic Great Lake. Aurora images were taken toward the north -- but over land ...

© Antoine & Dalia Grelin

🌌IC 4592: The Blue Horsehead Reflection Nebula Do you see the horse's head? 🔗 https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap230926.html

🌌Arp 142: The Hummingbird Galaxy What's happening to this spiral galaxy? Just a few hundred million years ago, NGC 2936, the upper of the two large galaxies shown at the bottom, was likely a normal spiral galaxy -- spinning, creating stars -- and minding its own business. But then it got too close to the massive elliptical galaxy NGC 2937, just below, and took a turn. Sometimes dubbed the Hummin ...

🌌A Ring of Fire Sunrise Solar Eclipse What's rising above the horizon behind those clouds? It's the Sun. Most sunrises don't look like this, though, because most sunrises don't include the Moon. In the early morning of 2013 May 10, however, from Western Australia, the Moon was between the Earth and the rising Sun. At times, it would be hard for the uninformed to understand what was happening. In ...

© Ian Griffin

🌌Afternoon Analemma An analemma is that figure-8 curve you get when you mark the position of the Sun at the same time each day for one year. To make this one, a 4x5 pinhole camera was set up looking north in southern New Zealand skies. The shutter was briefly opened each clear day in the afternoon at 4pm local time exposing the same photosensitized glass plate for the year spanning September 23, ...