APOD: 2024 August 14 Б Meteors and Aurora over Germany
14.08.2024

This was an unusual night. For one thing, the night sky of August 11 and 12, earlier this week, occurred near the peak of the annual Perseid Meteor Shower. Therefore, meteors streaked across the dark night as small bits cast off from Comet Swift-Tuttle came crashing into the Earth's atmosphere.

APOD: 2024 December 3 Б Ice Clouds over a Red Planet
3.12.2024

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.

APOD: 2025 March 4 Б A Quadruple Alignment over Italy
4.03.2025

Why does this Moon look so unusual? A key reason is its vivid red color. The color is caused by the deflection of blue light by Earth's atmosphere -- the same reason that the daytime sky appears blue. The Moon also appears unusually distorted.

APOD: 2023 June 11 Б The Sun and Its Missing Colors
11.06.2023

Here are all the visible colors of the Sun, produced by passing the Sun's light through a prism-like device. The spectrum was created at the McMath-Pierce Solar Observatory and shows, first off, that although our white-appearing Sun emits light of nearly every color, it appears brightest in yellow-green light.

APOD: 2023 August 29 Б Unusual Spiral Galaxy M66 from Webb
29.08.2023

Why isn't spiral galaxy M66 symmetric? Usually, density waves of gas, dust, and newly formed stars circle a spiral galaxy's center and create a nearly symmetric galaxy. The differences between...

APOD: 2024 July 17 Б Villarrica Volcano Against the Sky
17.07.2024

When Vulcan, the Roman god of fire, swings his blacksmith's hammer, the sky is lit on fire. A recent eruption of Chile's Villarrica volcano shows the delicate interplay between this fire -- actually...

APOD: 2025 January 15 Б Wolf Moon Engulfs Mars
15.01.2025

Does the Moon ever engulf Mars? Yes, but only in the sense that it moves in front, which happens on rare occasions. This happened just yesterday, though, as seen from some locations in North America and western Africa.

APOD: 2025 May 25 Б Beneath Jupiter
25.05.2025

Jupiter is stranger than we knew. NASA's Juno spacecraft has now completed over 70 swoops past Jupiter as it moves around its highly elliptical orbit. Pictured from 2017, Jupiter is seen from below where, surprisingly, the horizontal bands that cover most of the planet disappear into swirls and complex patterns.

APOD: 2025 June 11 Б 25 Brightest Stars in the Night Sky
11.06.2025

Do you know the names of some of the brightest stars? It's likely that you do, even though some bright stars have names so old they date back to near the beginning of written language.

APOD: 2024 November 3 Б Jupiter Abyss
3.11.2024

What's that black spot on Jupiter? No one is sure. During one pass of NASA's Juno over Jupiter, the robotic spacecraft imaged an usually dark cloud feature informally dubbed the Abyss. Surrounding cloud patterns show the Abyss to be at the center of a vortex.