Astronomy Picture of the Day

© Francesco Pelizzo

🌌Pleiades: The Seven Sisters Star Cluster Have you ever seen the Pleiades star cluster? Even if you have, you probably have never seen it as large and clear as this. Perhaps the most famous star cluster on the sky, the bright stars of the Pleiades can be seen with the unaided eye even from the depths of a light-polluted city. With a long exposure from a dark location, though, the dust cloud surr ...

🌌Aurora around Saturn's North Pole Are Saturn's auroras like Earth's? To help answer this question, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Cassini spacecraft monitored Saturn's North Pole simultaneously during Cassini's final orbits around the gas giant in September 2017. During this time, Saturn's tilt caused its North Pole to be clearly visible from Earth. The featured image is a composite of ultr ...

🌌Rocket Engine Fireplace You might not think a close up view of rocket engines producing 8.8 million pounds of thrust would be relaxing, but here it can be. In fact, you can get a warm and cozy feeling just spending a few moments watching NASA's holiday rocket engine fireplace. The video features a loop of the Space Launch System rocket's RS-25 main engines throttled up and running flanked by so ...

© Purple Mountain (Tsuchinshan)

🌌Xuyi Station and the Fireball Colorful and bright, this streaking fireball meteor was captured in a single exposure taken at Purple Mountain (Tsuchinshan) Observatory’s Xuyi Station in 2020, during planet Earth's annual Perseid meteor shower. The dome in the foreground houses the China Near Earth Object Survey Telescope (CNEOST), the largest multi-purpose Schmidt telescope in China. Located in ...

© Marco Lorenzi

🌌Stereo Jupiter near Opposition Jupiter looks sharp in these two rooftop telescope images. Both were captured last year on November 17 from Singapore, planet Earth, about two weeks after Jupiter's 2023 opposition. Climbing high in midnight skies the giant planet was a mere 33.4 light-minutes from Singapore. That's about 4 astronomical units away. Jupiter's planet girdling dark belts and light zo ...

🌌Driveway Analemma Does the Sun return to the same spot on the sky every day?  No.  A more visual answer is an analemma, a composite of sky images taken at the same time and from the same place over a year.  At completion, you can see that the Sun makes a figure 8 on the sky. The featured unusual analemma does not, however, picture the Sun directly: it was created by looking in the opposite dire ...

🌌Ice Clouds over a Red Planet If you could stand on Mars -- what might you see? You might look out over a vast orange landscape covered with rocks under a dusty orange sky, with a blue-tinted Sun setting over the horizon, and odd-shaped water clouds hovering high overhead. This was just the view captured last March by NASA's rolling explorer, Perseverance. The orange coloring is caused by rusted ...

© Daniel Stern

🌌NGC 300: A Galaxy of Stars This galaxy is unusual for how many stars it seems that you can see. Stars are so abundantly evident in this deep exposure of the spiral galaxy NGC 300 because so many of these stars are bright blue and grouped into resolvable bright star clusters. Additionally, NGC 300 is so clear because it is one of the closest spiral galaxies to Earth, as light takes only about 6 ...

🌌Cosmic Latte: The Average Color of the Universe What color is the universe? More precisely, if the entire sky were smeared out, what color would the final mix be? This whimsical question came up when trying to determine what stars are commonplace in nearby galaxies. The answer, depicted here, is a conditionally perceived shade of beige. In computer parlance: #FFF8E7. To determine this, astronom ...

© Camille Niel

🌌Winter and Summer on a Little Planet Winter and summer appear to come on a single night to this stunning little planet. It's planet Earth of course. The digitally mapped, nadir centered panorama covers 360x180 degrees and is composed of frames recorded during January and July from the Col du Galibier in the French Alps. Stars and nebulae of the northern winter (bottom) and summer Milky Way form ...

© Steve Crouch

🌌Messier 4 Messier 4 can be found west of bright red-giant star Antares, alpha star of the constellation Scorpius. M4 itself is only just visible from dark sky locations, even though the globular cluster of 100,000 stars or so is a mere 5,500 light-years away. Still, its proximity to prying telescopic eyes makes it a prime target for astronomical explorations. Recent studies have included Hubble ...

© Roberto Marinoni

🌌NGC 206 and the Star Clouds of Andromeda The large stellar association cataloged as NGC 206 is nestled within the dusty arms of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy along with the galaxy's pinkish star-forming regions. Also known as M31, the spiral galaxy is a mere 2.5 million light-years away. NGC 206 is found at the center of this sharp and detailed close-up of the southwestern extent of Andromed ...

© Wang Hao; Processing: Song Wentao

🌌The Meteor and the Comet How different are these two streaks? The streak on the upper right is Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas showing an impressive dust tail. The comet is a large and dirty iceberg that entered the inner Solar System and is shedding gas and dust as it is warmed by the Sun's light. The streak on the lower left is a meteor showing an impressive evaporation trail. The meteor is a small a ...

🌌The Sombrero Galaxy from Webb and Hubble This floating ring is the size of a galaxy. In fact, it is a galaxy -- or at least part of one: the photogenic Sombrero Galaxy is one of the largest galaxies in the nearby Virgo Cluster of Galaxies. The dark band of dust that obscures the mid-section of the Sombrero Galaxy in visible light (bottom panel) actually glows brightly in infrared light (top pan ...

© Alex Lin (Chilescope)

🌌The Horsehead Nebula One of the most identifiable nebulas in the sky, the Horsehead Nebula in Orion, is part of a large, dark, molecular cloud. Also known as Barnard 33, the unusual shape was first discovered on a photographic plate in the late 1800s. The red glow originates from hydrogen gas predominantly behind the nebula, ionized by the nearby bright star Sigma Orionis. The darkness of the H ...

🌌Journey to the Center of the Galaxy What lies at the center of our galaxy? In Jules Verne's science fiction classic, A Journey to the Center of the Earth, Professor Liedenbrock and his fellow explorers encounter many strange and exciting wonders. Astronomers already know of some of the bizarre objects that exist at our Galactic Center, including vast cosmic dust clouds, bright star clusters, sw ...

🌌Interplanetary Earth In an interplanetary first, on July 19, 2013 Earth was photographed on the same day from two other worlds of the Solar System, innermost planet Mercury and ringed gas giant Saturn. Pictured on the left, Earth is the pale blue dot just below the rings of Saturn, as captured by the robotic Cassini spacecraft then orbiting the outermost gas giant. On that same day people acros ...

© Bruno Rota Sargi

🌌The Medusa Nebula Braided and serpentine filaments of glowing gas suggest this nebula's popular name, The Medusa Nebula. Also known as Abell 21, this Medusa is an old planetary nebula some 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Gemini. Like its mythological namesake, the nebula is associated with a dramatic transformation. The planetary nebula phase represents a final stage in the evolutio ...

© Giorgio Ferrari

🌌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 constellation of Cepheus. Also known as vdB 142, this cosmic elephant's trunk is over 20 light-years long. The detailed telescopic view features the bright swept-back ridges and pockets of ...

🌌Earthset from Orion ght billion people are about to disappear in this snapshot from space taken on 2022 November 21. On the sixth day of the Artemis I mission, their home world is setting behind the Moon's bright edge as viewed by an external camera on the outbound Orion spacecraft. Orion was headed for a powered flyby that took it to within 130 kilometers of the lunar surface. Velocity gained ...

© Yuri Beletsky

🌌Undulatus Clouds over Las Campanas Observatory What's happening with these clouds? While it may seem that these long and thin clouds are pointing toward the top of a hill, and that maybe a world-famous observatory is located there, only part of that is true. In terms of clouds, the formation is a chance superposition of impressively periodic undulating air currents in Earth's lower atmosphere. ...

© Malcolm Loro

🌌Stars and Dust in the Pacman Nebula Stars can create huge and intricate dust sculptures from the dense and dark molecular clouds from which they are born. The tools the stars use to carve their detailed works are high energy light and fast stellar winds. The heat they generate evaporates the dark molecular dust as well as causing ambient hydrogen gas to disperse and glow. 🔗 https://apod.nasa.g ...

🌌LDN 1471: A Windblown Star Cavity What is the cause of this unusual parabolic structure? This illuminated cavity, known as LDN 1471, was created by a newly forming star, seen as the bright source at the peak of the parabola. This protostar is experiencing a stellar outflow which is then interacting with the surrounding material in the Perseus Molecular Cloud, causing it to brighten. We see only ...

🌌Pluto at Night The night side of Pluto spans this shadowy scene. In the stunning spacebased perspective the Sun is 4.9 billion kilometers (almost 4.5 light-hours) behind the dim and distant world. It was captured by far flung New Horizons in July of 2015 when the spacecraft was at a range of some 21,000 kilometers from Pluto, about 19 minutes after its closest approach. A denizen of the Kuiper ...

🌌Apollo 12 and Surveyor 3 Put on your red/blue glasses and gaze across the western Ocean of Storms on the surface of the Moon. The 3D anaglyph features Apollo 12 astronaut Pete Conrad visiting the Surveyor 3 spacecraft in November of 1969. Surveyor 3 had landed at the site on the inside slope of a small crater about 2 1/2 years earlier in April of 1967. Visible on the horizon beyond the far crat ...

© Ashraf Abu Sara

🌌IC 348 and Barnard 3 A great nebulous region near bright star omicron Persei offers this study in cosmic contrasts. Captured in the telescopic frame the colorful complex of dust, gas, and stars spans about 3 degrees on the sky along the edge of the Perseus molecular cloud some 1000 light-years away. Surrounded by a bluish halo of dust reflected starlight, omicron Persei itself is just left of c ...