Enhanced version of the Nasa astronomy picture of the day website
Apollo 17: The Crescent Earth
Our fair planet sports a curved, sunlit crescent against the black backdrop of space in this stunning photograph. From the unfamiliar perspective, the Earth is small and, like a telescopic image of...
Halley Dust, Mars Dust, and Milky Way
Grains of cosmic dust streaked through night skies in early May. Swept up as planet Earth plowed through the debris streams left behind by periodic Comet Halley, the annual meteor shower is known...
Fomalhaut's Dusty Debris Disk
Fomalhaut is a bright star, a 25 light-year voyage from planet Earth in the direction of the constellation Piscis Austrinus. Astronomers first noticed Fomalhaut's excess infrared emission in...
Milky Way over Egyptian Desert
For ten years the stargazer dreamed of taking a picture like this. The dreamer knew that the White Desert National Park in Egypt's Western Desert is a picturesque place hosting numerous chalk...
Shadows of Earth
Can you find two Earth shadows in today's image? It's a bit tricky. To find the first shadow, observe that the top part of the atmosphere appears pink and the lower part appears blue. This is...
The Spanish Dancer Spiral Galaxy
If not perfect, then this spiral galaxy is at least one of the most photogenic. An island universe containing billions of stars and situated about 40 million light-years away toward the...
The Helix Nebula from CFHT
Will our Sun look like this one day? The Helix Nebula is one of brightest and closest examples of a planetary nebula, a gas cloud created at the end of the life of a Sun-like star. The outer...
Twilight in a Flower
Transformed into the petals of a flower, 16 exposures show the passage of day into night in this creative timelapse skyscape. Start at the top and move counterclockwise to follow consecutive...
Shackleton from ShadowCam
Shackleton crater lies at the lunar south pole. Peaks along the rim of the 21 kilometer diameter crater are in sunlight, but Shackleton's floor is in dark permanent shadow. Still, this image of...
The Galaxy, the Jet, and a Famous Black Hole
Bright elliptical galaxy Messier 87 (M87) is home to the supermassive black hole captured in 2017 by planet Earth's Event Horizon Telescope in the first ever image of a black hole. Giant of the...
Centaurus A: A Peculiar Island of Stars
Galaxies are fascinating. In galaxies, gravity alone holds together massive collections of stars, dust, interstellar gas, stellar remnants and dark matter. Pictured is NGC 5128, better known as...
Flat Rock Hills on Mars
Why are there so many flat rocks on Mars? Some views of plains and hills on Mars show many rocks that are unusually flat when compared to rocks on Earth. One reason for this is a process that is...
Carina Nebula North
The Great Carina Nebula is home to strange stars and iconic nebulas. Named for its home constellation, the huge star-forming region is larger and brighter than the Great Orion Nebula but less well...
Saturn's Moon Helene in Color
Although its colors may be subtle, Saturn's moon Helene is an enigma in any light. The moon was imaged in unprecedented detail in 2012 as the robotic Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn swooped...
Solar Eclipse from a Ship
Along a narrow path that mostly avoided landfall, the shadow of the New Moon raced across planet Earth's southern hemisphere on April 20 to create a rare annular-total or hybrid solar eclipse....
Runaway Star Alpha Camelopardalis
Like a ship plowing through cosmic seas, runaway star Alpha Camelopardalis has produced this graceful arcing bow wave or bow shock. The massive supergiant star moves at over 60 kilometers per...
The Tarantula Nebula from SuperBIT
The Tarantula Nebula, also known as 30 Doradus, is more than a thousand light-years in diameter, a giant star forming region within nearby satellite galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud. About 160...
The Moon through the Arc de Triomphe
Was this a lucky shot? Although many amazing photographs are taken by someone who just happened to be in the right place at the right time, this image took skill and careful planning. First was the...
Northern Lights over Southern Europe
Did you see an aurora over the past two nights? Many people who don't live in Earth's far north did. Reports of aurora came in not only from northern locales in the USA as Alaska, but as far...
The Medulla Nebula Supernova Remnant
What powers this unusual nebula? CTB-1 is the expanding gas shell that was left when a massive star toward the constellation of Cassiopeia exploded about 10,000 years ago. The star likely detonated...