Harvest Moon Trail
23.09.2021

Famed in festival, story, and song the best known full moon is the Harvest Moon. For northern hemisphere dwellers that's a traditional name of the full moon nearest the September equinox. Seen from...

Full Moon over Brno
16.09.2016

After sunset this gorgeous full moon rose over Brno city in the Czech Republic on July 20, 2016. The panoramic image was made during a celebration of the 47th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing.

Shuttle Plume Shadow Points to Moon
3.06.2007

Why would the shadow of a space shuttle launch plume point toward the Moon? In early 2001 during a launch of Atlantis, the Sun, Earth, Moon, and rocket were all properly aligned for this photogenic coincidence.

Moon Meets Morning Star
24.08.2012

Rising in the dark hours before dawn, wandering Venus now shines as the brilliant morning star. Its close conjunction with the Moon on August 13 was appreciated around planet Earth. But skygazers in eastern...

Mercury And The Moon
11.11.1999

Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun and never moves far from our parent star in Earth's sky. Racing around its tight orbit, this well-done world is a little over 1/3 the diameter of Earth and is often lost to our view in the solar glare.

Water Discovered in Moon Shadow
18.11.2009

Why is there water on the Moon? Last month, the LCROSS mission crashed a large impactor into a permanently shadowed crater near the Moon's South Pole. A plume of dust rose that was visible to the satellite, although hard to discern from Earth. The plume is shown above in visible light.

APOD: 2025 August 30 Б A Two Percent Moon
30.08.2025

A young crescent moon can be hard to see. That's because when the Moon shows it's crescent phase (young or old) it can never be far from the Sun in planet Earth's sky.

Many Moons
5.07.2002

Whimsical and creative, this multiple exposure suggests that planet Earth's sky could be very dramatic indeed if it were graced by many moons. And in James Thurber's well-known children's story, Princess...

Spica, Mars, and Eclipsed Moon
16.04.2014

A beautiful, reddened Moon slid through dark skies on April 15, completely immersed in Earth's shadow for well over an hour. It was the year's first total lunar eclipse and was widely enjoyed over the planet's Western Hemisphere.

Lunokhod 1: Moon Robot
13.01.1996

On November 17, 1970 the Soviet Luna 17 spacecraft landed the first roving remote-controlled robot on the Moon. Known as Lunokhod 1, it weighed just under 2,000 pounds and was designed to operate for 90 days while guided by a 5-person team on planet Earth at the Deep Space Center near Moscow, USSR.