APOD: 2026 July 29 Á Psyche Receives Gravity Assist from Mars
29.07.2026

Solar System bodies make deep space exploration more fuel efficient! TodayÁs video shows the Psyche spacecraft gaining speed and changing its trajectory with minimal fuel spent due to a gravity assist from Mars in May 2026. Mars has an average orbital speed of almost 87,000 km/h (54,000 mph) around the Sun.

APOD: 2026 August 6 Á New Sharpest Image of the Sun Uncovers Instability
6.08.2026

What does the new sharpest image of our Sun show? Instability. To be clear, a certain kind of interactive process called the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI). This instability can create waves and swirls when two streams flow past each other -- in this case variable streams of solar magnetic plasma.

APOD: 2025 October 7 Á 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.

APOD: 2026 August 5 Á Spokes on Saturn's B Ring
5.08.2026

DonÁt get spooked by SaturnÁs ghostly spokes! Today we feature a nearly two-hour timelapse of Saturn and its rings looping forwards and backwards. A day on Saturn is only 10 hours long, so two hours of observation covers quite a bit of its rotation.

APOD: 2025 December 28 Á NGC 1898: Globular Cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud
28.12.2025

Jewels don't shine this bright -- only stars do. And almost every spot in this jewel-box of an image from the Hubble Space Telescope is a star. Now, some stars are more red than our Sun, and some more blue -- but all of them are much farther away.

APOD: 2025 November 11 Á Jupiter in Ultraviolet from Hubble
11.11.2025

Jupiter looks a bit different in ultraviolet light. To better interpret Jupiter's cloud motions and to help NASA's robotic Juno spacecraft understand the planetary context of the small fields that it sees, the Hubble Space Telescope was being directed to regularly image the entire Jovian giant.

APOD: 2025 October 10 Á 50 Light-years to 51 Pegasi
10.10.2025

It's only 50 light-years to 51 Pegasi. That star's position is indicated in this snapshot from August 2025, taken on a night with mostly brighter stars visible above the dome at Observatoire de Haute-Provence in France.

APOD: 2025 December 30 Á An Artificial Comet
30.12.2025

Yes, but can your comet tail do this? No, and what you are seeing is not the tail of a comet. The picture features a cleverly overlayed time-lapse sequence of a group of satellites orbiting Earth together in June.

APOD: 2026 July 24 Á RCW 86: Historical Supernova Remnant
24.07.2026

In 185 AD, Chinese astronomers recorded the appearance of a new star in the Nanmen asterism. That part of the sky is identified with part of the southern constellation Centaurus on modern star charts.

APOD: 2026 August 10 Á Three Galaxy Pairs
10.08.2026

Each of these pairs of galaxies is different. The two galaxies at the top are likely not interacting, at least presently. However, the top galaxy with the blue stripe, NGC 4650A, is a polar ring galaxy and may be the result of a past galaxy collision.