APOD: 1996-06-30

1996-06-30

Launched in the early 1970s Pioneer 10 and 11 were appropriately named - becoming the first spacecraft to travel through the asteroid belt, first to fly by Jupiter and Saturn, and the first human artifacts to venture beyond the solar system. Now ...

APOD: 1996-06-29

1996-06-29

Launched in the summer of 1977, NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft are now over 4.5 billion miles from the Sun. Still operational, the Voyagers are being tracked and commanded through the Deep Space Network. Having traveled beyond the outer ...

APOD: 1996-06-28

1996-06-28

Researchers believe that the faint reddish smudge indicated by the arrow in the image above is a candidate for the most distant known galaxy which may have existed only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. The image is part of the ...

APOD: 1996-06-27

1996-06-27

NASA's robot spacecraft Galileo began its long voyage to Jupiter in October of 1989. In December of last year it arrived in the Jovian system, beginning its unprecedented, detailed exploration by dropping a probe into the gas giant's atmosphere. ...

APOD: 1996-06-26

1996-06-26

French astronomer Charles Messier was born on June 26, 1730. Inspired by childhood sightings of comets and a solar eclipse visible from his home town of Badonvillier, he became an astronomer and comet hunter who kept careful records of his ...

APOD: 1996-06-25

1996-06-25

Stars sometimes form in colorful ways. Pictured above is a small region in the nearby LMC galaxy where stars are forming. After a star is born, it may do several things to energize its immediate neighborhood. It may develop a strong wind which ...

APOD: 1996-06-24

1996-06-24

Color information from the Soviet Venera landers and radar data from the Magellan spacecraft were used to construct this striking perspective view of the Venusian landscape. (In this computer generated image, the vertical scale has been ...

APOD: 1996-06-23

1996-06-23

How often do stars explode? By looking at external galaxies, astronomers can guess that these events, known as a supernovae, should occur about once every 30 years in a typical spiral galaxy like our MilkyWay. However, the obscuring gas and dust ...

APOD: 1996-06-22

1996-06-22

This image is from the voyage of the intrepid Galileo spacecraft as it passed above the Moon's north pole on its long journey to Jupiter. It was made over 60 years after Admiral Byrd became the first to fly over the Earth's north pole. Within a ...

APOD: 1996-06-21

1996-06-21

Pictured above is one of the world's premiere radio astronomical observatories: The Very Large Array (VLA). Each antenna dish is as big as a house (25 meters across) and mounted on railroad tracks. The VLA consists of 27 dishes - together capable ...