6 Up 5 Down
2.06.1996

This fish-eye view of a dramatic night launch of the Shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-76 was recorded on March 22, 1996. The mission carried 6 astronauts aloft, and returned with 5 -- delivering one crew member, Shannon Lucid, to the Mir Space Station. Lucid is currently onboard the Mir as a cosmonaut guest researcher.

A Flying Astronaut Over Earth
2.10.2001

What would it be like to fly free over the seas and clouds of Earth? In 1994 astronaut Mark Lee found out when he tested the Simplified Aid for EVA Rescue (SAFER) system for NASA. SAFER is a backpack propulsion unit that incorporates small nitrogen thrusters controlled by hand and moderated by computer.

Orion Launch
5.12.2014

Headed for two orbits of planet Earth and a splashdown in the Pacific, Orion blazed into the early morning sky on Friday at 7:05am ET. The spacecraft was launched atop a United Launch Aliance Delta IV Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

50 Years Ago: Yuri s Planet
12.04.2011

On April 12th, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alexseyevich Gagarin became the first human in space. His remotely controlled Vostok 1 spacecraft lofted him to an altitude of 200 miles and carried him once around planet Earth. Commenting on the first view from space he reported, "The sky is very dark; the Earth is bluish.

Hole in the Sun
27.09.2007

The dark expanse below the equator of the Sun is a coronal hole -- a low density region extending above the surface where the solar magnetic field opens freely into interplanetary space. Shown in false color, the picture was recorded on September 19th in extreme ultraviolet light by the EIT instrument onboard the space-based SOHO observatory.

Asteroid 2005 YU55 Passes the Earth
9.11.2011

Asteroid 2005 YU55 passed by the Earth yesterday, posing no danger. The space rock, estimated to be about 400 meters across, coasted by just inside the orbit of Earth's Moon. Although the passing...

APOD: 2025 October 7 Б SN Encore: A Second Supernova Seen Several Times
7.10.2025

Now a second supernova in this same galaxy is repeating. The cause is the gravitational lens effect of a massive foreground cluster of galaxies (MACS J0138) -- it creates multiple images of a perfectly aligned background galaxy (MRG-M0138). What's particularly interesting is that this background galaxy has young stars that keep blowing up.

The Crew 8 Nebula
7.03.2024

Not the James Webb Space Telescope's latest view of a distant galactic nebula, this cloud of gas and dust dazzled spacecoast skygazers on March 3. The telephoto snapshot was taken minutes after the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket on the SpaceX Crew-8 mission, to the International Space Station.

Mercury Astronauts and a Redstone
4.04.1998

Space suited project Mercury astronauts John H. Glenn, Virgil I. Grissom, and Alan B. Shepard Jr. (left to right) are posing in front of a Redstone rocket in this vintage 1961 NASA publicity photo. Project Mercury was the first U.S. program designed to put humans in space.

An Earth Ornament
25.12.1999

The Apollo 8 astronauts spent the 1968 Christmas Season orbiting the Moon, returning with striking images of both Moon and Earth from space - pictures which inspired the world. While in lunar orbit...