Persistent Saturnian Auroras
22.06.2014

Are Saturn's auroras like Earth's? To help answer this question, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Cassini spacecraft monitored Saturn's South Pole simultaneously as Cassini closed in on the gas giant in January 2004. Hubble snapped images in ultraviolet light, while Cassini recorded radio emissions and monitored the solar wind.

APOD: 2026 January 25 Б Phobos: Doomed Moon of Mars
25.01.2026

This moon is doomed. Mars, the red planet named for the Roman god of war, has two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, whose names are derived from the Greek for Fear and Panic. These...

APOD: 2026 April 19 Б Eye on the Milky Way
19.04.2026

Have you ever had stars in your eyes? It appears that the eye on the left does, and moreover, it appears to be gazing at even more stars. The featured 27-frame mosaic was taken in 2019 from Ojas de Salar in the Atacama Desert of Chile.

X Ray Saturn
12.03.2004

Above, the ringed planet Saturn shines in x-rays. Otherwise beyond the range of human vision, the eerie x-ray view was created by overlaying a computer generated outline of the gas giant's disk and ring system on a false-color picture of smoothed, reconstructed x-ray data from the orbiting Chandra Observatory.

Halley Dust and Milky Way
10.05.2019

Grains of cosmic dust streaked through the mostly moonless night skies of May 7. Swept up as planet Earth plowed through the debris streams left behind by periodic Comet Halley, the annual meteor shower is known as the Eta Aquarids.

APOD: 2023 January 2 Б After Sunset Planet Parade
2.01.2023

Look up tonight and see a whole bunch of planets. Just after sunset, looking west, planets Venus, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars will all be simultaneously visible. Listed west to east, this planetary lineup will have Venus nearest the horizon, but setting shortly after the Sun.

Love and War by Moonlight
24.05.2002

Venus, named for the Roman goddess of love, and Mars, the war god's namesake, approach each other by moonlight in this lovely sky view recorded on May 14th from Dunkirk, Maryland, USA.

A Leonids Meteor Storm in 1999
24.11.1999

The 1999 Leonids meteor shower was not equally good for everybody. Only observers in Europe and the Middle East with clear skies near 2 am (UTC) on 1999 November 18 saw rates shoot up to a meteor every few seconds.

Cassini Flyby
26.08.1999

Connect the dots and you'll trace the path of the Cassini spacecraft as it took a final turn by Earth on its way to the outer solar system. The dots (in a horizontal row just below center) are actually successive images of the spacecraft.

Asteroid Donaldjohanson
25.04.2025

Main belt asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson is about 8 kilometers long and 3.5 kilometers across. On April 20, this sharp close-up of the asteroid was captured at a distance of about 1100 kilometers by the Lucy spacecraft's long range camera during its second asteroid encounter.