Astronomy Picture of the Day

1999-07-30

On February 20th, 1965, the Ranger 8 spacecraft crashed into the Moon. Rapidly transmitting a series of pictures to ground controllers, its camera recorded this one at an altitude of about 11 kilometers, 5 seconds before impacting the lunar ...

1999-07-29

The bright blob of hydrogen gas cataloged as N88A is seen at the right. It measures a mere 3 light years across. Emerging from the cool, dusty interstellar medium in a nearby irregular galaxy known as the Small Magellanic Cloud, N88A hides hot ...

1999-07-28 DMSP

This is what Asia looks like at night! Can you find your favorite Asian city? Although not all of Asia is shown, city lights might make this task possible. The above picture is actually a composite of over 200 images made by satellites orbiting ...

1999-07-26 Pekka Parviainen

Sometimes it's night on the ground but day in the air. As the Earth rotates to eclipse the Sun, sunset rises up from the ground. Therefore, at sunset on the ground, sunlight still shines on clouds above. Under usual circumstances, a pretty ...

1999-07-25

The shockwave from a 20,000 year-old supernova in the constellation of Cygnus supernova explosion is still expanding into interstellar space. The collision of this fast moving wall of gas with a stationary cloud has heated it causing it to glow ...

1999-07-24

This delightfully detailed false color image of Saturn was earmarked to celebrate the 8th anniversary of the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope

1999-07-22

Hundreds of galaxies appear as faint smudges of light in this Hubble Space Telescope picture of galaxy cluster MS1054-03. Eight billion light-years away, the cluster is among the most distant known clusters of galaxies and is now reported to ...

1999-07-21

About 8000 years ago, a star in our Galaxy exploded. Ancient humans might have noticed the supernova as a temporary star, but modern humans can see the expanding shell of gas even today. In the above false-color infrared image of supernova ...

1999-07-20

On July 20, 1969, only four days after leaving planet Earth 250,000 miles behind them, Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the moon - the first humans to reach another celestial body. But the Saturn V rocket which took them there actually "began" the ...

1999-07-19

In one of the brightest parts of the Milky Way lies a nebula where some of the oddest things occur. NGC 3372, known as the Great Nebula in Carina, is home to massive stars and changing nebula. Eta Carina, the most energetic star in the nebula ...