Europa and Jupiter from Voyager 1
28.06.2020

What are those spots on Jupiter? Largest and furthest, just right of center, is the Great Red Spot -- a huge storm system that has been raging on Jupiter possibly since Giovanni Cassini's likely notation of it 355 years ago. It is not yet known why this Great Spot is red.

Gems of a Maldivean Night
28.03.2022

The southernmost part of the Milky Way contains not only the stars of the Southern Cross, but the closest star system to our Sun -- Alpha Centauri. The Southern Cross itself is topped by the bright, yellowish star Gamma Crucis.

APOD: 2026 February 9 Б Miranda Revisited
9.02.2026

What is Miranda really like? Visually, old images from NASA's Voyager 2 have been recently combined and remastered to result in the featured image of Uranus's 500-kilometer-wide moon. In the late 1980s...

Inside Mars
23.03.2000

What's inside Mars? From orbit, the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft has recorded detailed images of the red planet since July 1997. Still, its cameras can not look beneath the surface. But minute...

The Barren Moon
3.01.1998

The above photo, taken as the Apollo 17 astronauts orbited the Moon in 1972, depicts the stark lunar surface around the Eratosthenes and Copernicus craters. Many similar images of a Moon devoid of life are familiar to denizens of the space age.

APOD: 2024 March 31 Б Total Solar Eclipse Below the Bottom of the World
31.03.2024

In late 2021 there was a total solar eclipse visible only at the end of the Earth. To capture the unusual phenomenon, airplanes took flight below the clouded seascape of Southern Ocean. The featured...

Europa and Jupiter from Voyager 1
17.07.2022

What are those spots on Jupiter? Largest and furthest, just right of center, is the Great Red Spot -- a huge storm system that has been raging on Jupiter possibly since Giovanni Cassini's likely notation of it 357 years ago. It is not yet known why this Great Spot is red.

31 Million Miles from Planet Earth
3.09.2008

On July 4th, 2005, the Deep Impact spacecraft directed a probe to impact the nucleus of Comet Tempel 1. Still cruising through the solar system, earlier this year the robotic spacecraft looked back to record a series of images of its home world 31 million miles (50 million kilometers) away.

In the Shadow of Saturns Rings
3.07.2012

Humanity's robot orbiting Saturn has recorded yet another amazing view. That robot, or course, is the spacecraft Cassini, while the new amazing view includes a bright moon, thin rings, oddly broken clouds, and warped shadows. Titan, Saturn's largest moon, appears above as a featureless tan as it is continually shrouded in thick clouds.

Io: The Prometheus Plume
22.05.2011

What's happening on Jupiter's moon Io? Two sulfurous eruptions are visible on Jupiter's volcanic moon Io in this color composite image from the robotic Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003.