APOD Turns Eight
16.06.2003

The first APOD appeared eight years ago today, on 1995 June 16. To date, we estimate that APOD has now served over 100 million space-related images. We again thank our readers and NASA...

STARDUST Flyby of Comet Wild 2
19.01.2004

Flying past a comet nucleus is dangerous. On January 2, the robot spacecraft STARDUST became one of the first to plow through the surrounding cloud of dust and grit to photograph the very heart of a comet.

ERAST Pathfinder Plus: Daedalus Defied
12.08.1998

Daedalus warned Icarus that if he flew too high, the Sun would melt his wings. Apparently, nobody gave the ERAST Pathfinder-Plus aircraft a similar warning. Earlier this month, not only did Pathfinder-Plus fly higher than any previous propeller-driven aircraft - its wings converted sunlight into power.

Orion in Infrared
19.04.2005

Do you recognize the constellation Orion? This striking but unfamiliar looking picture of the familiar Orion region of the sky was produced using survey data from the now-defunct InfraRed Astronomical Satellite (IRAS). The above image combines information recorded at three different invisible infrared wavelengths and covers about 30x24 degrees on the sky.

America Returns to Space Flight
27.07.2005

NASA's launch of the massive Space Shuttle Discovery yesterday brought a nation known for its tremendous space program back to human space flight. Shuttle flights had been suspended for over two years previously following the tragic loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia crew on 2003 February 1.

Tumultuous Clouds of Jupiter
6.01.2020

Some cloud patterns on Jupiter are quite complex. The featured tumultuous clouds were captured in May by NASA's robotic Juno spacecraft currently orbiting our Solar System's largest planet. The image was taken...

A Quasar in the Gamma Ray Sky
17.11.1996

The bright object in the center of the false color image above is quasar 3C279 viewed in gamma-rays, photons with more than 40 million times the energy of visible light. Like all quasars, 3C279 is a nondescript, faint, starlike object in the visible sky.

Sol 5 Postcard from Mars
9.01.2004

A martian Sol - the average martian solar day - is about 39 minutes longer than Earth's familiar 24 hour day. Operating on martian time, the Spirit rover recently sent back this color postcard image, recorded on Sol 5 of its stay on the martian surface.

APOD: 2004 August 28- M17: A Hubble Close-Up
28.08.2004

Sculpted by stellar winds and radiation, these fantastic, undulating shapes lie within the stellar nursery known as M17, the Omega Nebula, some 5,500 light-years away in the nebula-rich constellation Sagittarius. The lumpy features...

Saturns Iapetus: Moon with a Strange Surface
1.02.2005

What has happened to Saturn's moon Iapetus? A strange ridge crosses the moon near the equator, visible near the bottom of the above image, making Iapetus appear similar to the pit of a peach. Half of Iapetus is so dark that it can nearly disappear when viewed from Earth.