Astronomy Picture of the Day

115
Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. provided by NASA and Michigan Technological University (MTU).
Astronomy Picture of the Day
32
🌌M1: The Incredible Expanding Crab Cataloged as M1, the Crab Nebula is the first on Charles Messier's famous list of things which are not comets. In fact, the Crab Nebula is now known to be a supernova remnant, an expanding cloud of debris from the death explosion of a massive star. The violent birth of the Crab was witnessed by astronomers in the year 1054. Roughly 10 light-years across, the ne ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
33
© Collaborative Astrophotography Team (CAT)

M81M82_CAT_3780.jpg

jpg
1,03 Мб
Astronomy Picture of the Day
34
🌌Galaxy Wars: M81 versus M82 In the upper left corner, surrounded by blue arms and dotted with red nebulas, is spiral galaxy M81. In the lower right corner, marked by a light central line and surrounded by red glowing gas, is irregular galaxy M82. This stunning vista shows these two mammoth galaxies locked in gravitational combat, as they have been for the past billion years. 🔗 https://apod.nas ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
36
🌌The Doubly Warped World of Binary Black Holes If one black hole looks strange, what about two? Light rays from accretion disks around a pair of orbiting supermassive black holes make their way through the warped space-time produced by extreme gravity in this detailed computer visualization. The simulated accretion disks have been given different false color schemes, red for the disk surrounding ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
36
© Jose Antonio Hervas

PlanetLines_Hervas_2603.jpg

jpg
6,16 Мб
Astronomy Picture of the Day
36
🌌Planet Lines Across Water What’s causing those lines? Objects in the sky sometimes appear reflected as lines across water — but why? If the water’s surface is smooth, then reflected objects would appear similarly -- as spots. But if the water is choppy, then there are many places where light from the object can reflect off the water and still come to you -- and so together form, typically, a li ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
38

blackholedisk_cfa_1080.jpg

jpg
221,389 Кб
Astronomy Picture of the Day
39
🌌Spin up of a Supermassive Black Hole How fast can a black hole spin? If any object made of regular matter spins too fast -- it breaks apart. But a black hole might not be able to break apart -- and its maximum spin rate is really unknown. Theorists usually model rapidly rotating black holes with the Kerr solution to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which predicts several amazing and unu ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
39
🌌Titan: Moon over Saturn Like Earth's moon, Saturn's largest moon Titan is locked in synchronous rotation with its planet. This mosaic of images recorded by the Cassini spacecraft in May of 2012 shows its anti-Saturn side, the side always facing away from the ringed gas giant. The only moon in the solar system with a dense atmosphere, Titan is the only solar system world besides Earth known to h ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
38
🌌Young Star Cluster NGC 346 The most massive young star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud is NGC 346, embedded in our small satellite galaxy's largest star forming region some 210,000 light-years distant. Of course the massive stars of NGC 346 are short lived, but very energetic. Their winds and radiation sculpt the edges of the region's dusty molecular cloud triggering star-formation within ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
40

messengerImpactSite_black.jpg

jpg
905,072 Кб
Astronomy Picture of the Day
39
🌌MESSENGER's Last Day on Mercury The first to orbit inner planet Mercury, the MESSENGER spacecraft came to rest on this region of Mercury's surface on April 30, 2015. Constructed from MESSENGER image and laser altimeter data, the projected scene looks north over the northeastern rim of the broad, lava filled Shakespeare basin. The large, 48 kilometer (30 mile) wide crater Janacek is near the upp ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
43
© Daniel Korona

HappySkyMexico_Korona_1358.jpg

jpg
190,492 Кб
Astronomy Picture of the Day
42
🌌A Happy Sky over Bufa Hill in Mexico Sometimes, the sky itself seems to smile. A few days ago, visible over much of the world, an unusual superposition of our Moon with the planets Venus and Saturn created just such an iconic facial expression. Specifically, a crescent Moon appeared to make a happy face on the night sky when paired with seemingly nearby planets. Pictured is the scene as it appe ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
41
© Natan Fontes

SaturnSeasons_Fontes_960.jpg

jpg
78,524 Кб
Astronomy Picture of the Day
40
🌌Saturn's Rings Appear to Disappear Where are Saturn's ears? Galileo is credited, in 1610, as the first person to see Saturn's rings. Testing out Lipperhey's recently co-invented telescope, Galileo did not know what they were and so called them "ears". The mystery deepened in 1612, when Saturn's ears mysteriously disappeared. Today we know exactly what happened: from the perspective of the Earth ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
42
© Francis Bozon & Cecil Navick (AstroA. R. O.)

Gum37Hoo_Bozon_4863.jpg

jpg
2,23 Мб
Astronomy Picture of the Day
41
🌌Gum 37 and the Southern Tadpoles This cosmic skyscape features glowing gas and dark dust clouds alongside the young stars of NGC 3572. A beautiful emission nebula and star cluster, it sails far southern skies within the nautical constellation Carina. Stars from NGC 3572 are toward top center in the telescopic frame that would measure about 100 light-years across at the cluster's estimated dista ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
41

Spirograph_Hubble_2119.jpg

jpg
367,283 Кб
Astronomy Picture of the Day
44
🌌IC 418: The Spirograph Nebula What is creating the strange texture of IC 418? Dubbed the Spirograph Nebula for its resemblance to drawings from a cyclical drawing tool, planetary nebula IC 418 shows patterns that are not well understood. Perhaps they are related to chaotic winds from the variable central star, which changes brightness unpredictably in just a few hours. By contrast, evidence ind ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
44
🌌Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 5335 This stunning portrait of NGC 5335 was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Some 170,000 light-years across and over 200 million light-years away toward the constellation Virgo, the magnificent spiral galaxy is seen face-on in Hubble's view. Within the galactic disk, loose streamers of star forming regions lie along the galaxy's flocculent spiral arms. But the m ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
44

final_0798443319_dec.png

png
793,184 Кб
Astronomy Picture of the Day
44
🌌Asteroid Donaldjohanson Main belt asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson is about 8 kilometers long and 3.5 kilometers across. On April 20, this sharp close-up of the asteroid was captured at a distance of about 1100 kilometers by the Lucy spacecraft's long range camera during its second asteroid encounter. Named after American paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, discoverer of the Lucy hominid fossil, ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
44
© Daniel Stern

NGC_6164_r4_2048.jpg

jpg
987,94 Кб
Astronomy Picture of the Day
45
🌌NGC 6164: A Dragon's Egg Beautiful emission nebula NGC 6164 was created by a rare, hot, luminous O-type star, some 40 times as massive as the Sun. Seen at the center of the cosmic cloud, the star is a mere 3 to 4 million years old. In another three to four million years the massive star will end its life in a supernova explosion. Spanning around 4 light-years, the nebula itself has a bipolar sy ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
46
© Koen van Barneveld

EverythingSky_Koen_3504.jpg

jpg
3,18 Мб
Astronomy Picture of the Day
46
🌌An Almost Everything Sky This surprising sky has almost everything. First, slanting down from the upper left and far in the distance is the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy. More modestly, slanting down from the upper right and high in Earth's atmosphere is a bright meteor. The dim band of light across the central diagonal is zodiacal light: sunlight reflected from dust in the inner Solar S ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
49
© Rich Addis

TerminatorMoon_Addis_3558.jpg

jpg
3,11 Мб
Astronomy Picture of the Day
46
🌌Terminator Moon: A Moonscape of Shadows What's different about this Moon? It's the terminators. In the featured image, you can't directly see any terminator -- the line that divides the light of day from the dark of night. That's because the featured image is a digital composite of many near-terminator lunar strips over a full Moon. Terminator regions show the longest and most prominent shadows ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
46

GalaxiesLens_Webb_1146.jpg

jpg
144,6 Кб
Astronomy Picture of the Day
46
🌌Galaxy Lenses Galaxy from Webb Is this one galaxy or two? Although it looks like one, the answer is two. One path to this happening is when a small galaxy collides with a larger galaxy and ends up in the center. But in the featured image, something more rare is going on. Here, the central light-colored elliptical galaxy is much closer than the blue and red-colored spiral galaxy that surrounds i ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
48
© Infrared: NASA, Spitzer Space Telescope; Visible: Oliver Czernetz, Siding Spring Obs.

M42_SpitzerCzernetz_2000.jpg

jpg
399,422 Кб
Astronomy Picture of the Day
47
🌌The Orion Nebula in Visible and Infrared The Great Nebula in Orion is a colorful place. Visible to the unaided eye, it appears as a small fuzzy patch in the constellation of Orion. Long exposure, multi-wavelength images like this, however, show the Orion Nebula to be a busy neighborhood of young stars, hot gas, and dark dust. This digital composite features not only three colors of visible ligh ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
50

PIA21983JupiterLundh.jpg

jpg
384,08 Кб
Astronomy Picture of the Day
48
🌌Painting with Jupiter In digital brush strokes, Jupiter's signature atmospheric bands and vortices were used to form this interplanetary post-impressionist work of art. The creative image from citizen scientist Rick Lundh uses data from the Juno spacecraft's JunoCam. To paint on the digital canvas, a JunoCam image with contrasting light and dark tones was chosen for processing and an oil-painti ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
49
© Dan Bartlett

C2025_F2SWAN_20250414_DEBartlett.jpg

jpg
337,702 Кб
Astronomy Picture of the Day
52
🌌Comet C/2025 F2 SWAN In late March, the comet now designated C/2025 F2 SWAN was found independently by citizen scientists Vladimir Bezugly, Michael Mattiazzo, and Rob Matson while examining publicly available image data from the Solar Wind ANisotropies (SWAN) camera on the sun-staring SOHO spacecraft. Comet SWAN's coma, its greenish color a signature of diatomic carbon molecules fluorescing in ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
50
© Daniel Adibi

LRGB_final_corrected2048.jpg

jpg
1,72 Мб
Astronomy Picture of the Day
48
🌌Virgo Cluster Galaxies Galaxies of the Virgo Cluster are scattered across this nearly 4 degree wide telescopic field of view. About 50 million light-years distant, the Virgo Cluster is the closest large galaxy cluster to our own local galaxy group. Prominent here are Virgo's bright elliptical galaxies from the Messier catalog, M87 at bottom left, and M86 and M84 near center right. M86 and M84 a ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
49
© Taavi Niittee (Tõrva Astronomy Club)

CatsEyeWide_Niittee_960.jpg

jpg
151,884 Кб
Astronomy Picture of the Day
51
🌌Halo of the Cat's Eye What created the unusual halo around the Cat's Eye Nebula? No one is sure. What is sure is that the Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC 6543) is one of the best known planetary nebulae on the sky. Although haunting symmetries are seen in the bright central region, this image was taken to feature its intricately structured outer halo, which spans over three light-years across. Planetary ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
51

NGC1514_WebbSchmidt_1983.jpg

jpg
445,484 Кб
Astronomy Picture of the Day
51
🌌Planetary Nebula NGC 1514 from Webb What happens when a star runs out of nuclear fuel? For stars like our Sun, the center condenses into a white dwarf while the outer atmosphere is expelled into space to appear as a planetary nebula. The expelled outer atmosphere of planetary nebula NGC 1514 appears to be a jumble of bubbles -- when seen in visible light. But the view from the James Webb Space ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
53

GCenter_MeerKatWebb_7642.jpg

jpg
5,27 Мб
Astronomy Picture of the Day
54
🌌The Galactic Center in Radio from MeerKAT What's happening at the center of our galaxy? It's hard to tell with optical telescopes since visible light is blocked by intervening interstellar dust. In other bands of light, though, such as radio, the galactic center can be imaged and shows itself to be quite an interesting and active place. The featured picture shows an image of our Milky Way's cen ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
55
🌌An Unusual Hole in Mars What created this unusual hole in Mars? Actually, there are numerous holes pictured in this Swiss cheese-like landscape, with all-but-one of them showing a dusty, dark, Martian terrain beneath evaporating, light, carbon dioxide ice. The most unusual hole is on the upper right, spans about 100 meters, and seems to punch through to a lower level. Why this hole exists and w ...