Colorful Water Clouds Over Mars
17.04.2001

One place where water can be found on Mars is in clouds. In the above picture colorful water clouds are visible just after sunrise in and around a maze of canyons known as Noctis Labyrinthus (the labyrinth of the night).

Columbia Dawn
8.03.2002

Trailing a thick column of exhaust, the Space Shuttle Columbia blasted into the twilight morning sky on March 1, its thundering rockets briefly flooding a cloud bank with the light of a false dawn. The event marked the start of the ongoing eleven day mission to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory
11.08.1995

The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) was the most massive instrument ever launched by a NASA Space Shuttle and continues to revolutionize gamma-ray astronomy. This orbiting observatory sees the sky in gamma-ray photons - light so blue humans can't see it.

Uranus's Moon Umbriel: A Mysterious Dark World
7.04.1996

Why is Umbriel so dark? This dark moon reflects only half the light of other Uranus' moons such as Ariel. And what is that bright ring at the top? Unfortunately, nobody yet knows. These questions presented themselves when Voyager 2 passed this satellite of Uranus in January 1986.

A Magellanic Starfield
4.01.2003

Stars of many types and colors are visible in this Hubble Space Telescope close-up of a starfield in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Over 10,000 stars are visible -- the brightest of which are giant stars. Were our Sun at the distance of these stars, about 170,000 light-years, it would hardly be discernable.

Seeing Through Saturns C Ring
20.09.2004

Are Saturn's rings transparent? The Cassini spacecraft that recently entered orbit around Saturn has confirmed that some of Saturn's rings are more transparent than others. Pictured above, Saturn's main A, B, and C rings can be seen, top to bottom, superposed against the gas giant planet.

Huygens Images Titan s Surface
15.01.2005

After a seven year interplanetary voyage on board the the Cassini spacecraft, the European Space Agency's Huygens probe parachuted to a historic landing on Saturn's moon Titan on January 14. Above...

The Galactic Center Across the Infrared
5.07.2000

The center of our Galaxy is obscured in visible light by dark dust that rotates with the stars in the Galactic Plane. In this century, however, sensors have been developed that can detect light more red that humans can see - light called infrared.

APOD: 2025 October 2 Б Pluto at Night
2.10.2025

The night side of Pluto spans this shadowy scene. In the stunning spacebased perspective, the Sun is 4.9 billion kilometers (almost 4.5 light-hours) behind the dim and distant world. It was captured by far flung New Horizons in July of 2015 when the spacecraft was at a range of some 21,000 kilometers from Pluto.

Io over Jupiter from Voyager 1
4.09.2016

Back in 1979, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft flew past Jupiter and its moons. The images in this mosaic, featuring the moon Io against a background of gas giant Jupiter's diffuse swirling cloud bands, were recorded by Voyager's camera from a distance of about 8.3 million kilometers.