Mysterious Features on Ganymede
9.12.1997

Where is the rest of the circle? Jupiter's largest moon Ganymede has some truly unusual terrain, including the pictured half circle above cut by nearly parallel curves. Full circles can be easily explained by impact craters, but partial circles imply that some resurfacing has occurred since the original impact.

Mercury And The Moon
11.11.1999

Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun and never moves far from our parent star in Earth's sky. Racing around its tight orbit, this well-done world is a little over 1/3 the diameter of Earth and is often lost to our view in the solar glare.

Lunar View, Solar Eclipse
31.08.2017

Orbiting above the lunar nearside on August 21, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter turned to look back on a bright, Full Earth. As anticipated its Narrow Angle Camera scanned this sharp view of our fair...

Bright Venus
8.03.2001

Have you seen a bright evening star in the western sky lately? That's no star, that's planet Venus the second "rock" from the Sun. Blazing at -4.6 magnitude, Venus, after the Sun and Moon, is the third brightest celestial body in planet Earth's sky.

A Solar Eclipse Quilt
13.11.2012

Some people are so inspired by solar eclipses that they quilt. Pictured above is a resulting textile from one such inspiration. The 38x38 inch quilt offers impressions of a total annular eclipse, when the Moon is too far from the Earth to cover the entire Sun, witnessed in Spain in October of 2005.

Saturn the Giant
9.11.2019

On May 25, 1961 U.S. president John Kennedy announced the goal of landing astronauts on the Moon by the end of the decade. By November 9, 1967 this Saturn V rocket was ready for launch and the first full test of its capabilities on the Apollo 4 mission.

The Map of Dione
6.11.2014

This cylindrical projection global map is one of six new color maps of Saturn's midsized icy moons, constructed using 10 years of image data from the Cassini spacecraft. Discovered by Cassini (the astronomer) in 1684, Dione is about 1,120 kilometers across.

A Sky Full Of Planets
4.12.1997

Look up tonight. Just after sunset, the crescent moon and all five "naked-eye" planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) will be visible (depending on your latitude), lying near our solar system's ecliptic plane.

APOD: 2023 September 17 Б Moon Mountains Magnified during Ring of Fire Eclipse
17.09.2023

What are those dark streaks in this composite image of a solar eclipse? They are reversed shadows of mountains at the edge of the Moon. The center image, captured from Xiamen, China, has the Moon's center directly in front of the Sun's center.

Europa Full Face
20.11.1996

What mysteries might be solved by peering into this crystal ball? This crystal ball is quite unusual because it is actually a moon of Jupiter, the crystals are ice-crystals, and the ball is not only dirty and opaque but cracked beyond repair.