Solar Sail
21.08.2004

Could solar sailing become a future Olympic sport? Nearly 400 years ago astronomer Johannes Kepler observed comet tails blown by a solar breeze and suggested that vessels might likewise navigate through space using appropriately fashioned sails.

APOD Turns Eleven
16.06.2006

The first APOD appeared eleven years ago today, on 1995 June 16. Although garnering only 14 page views on that day, we are proud to estimate that APOD has now served over 400 million space-related images over the last eleven years.

Moon Corona, Halo, and Arcs over Manitoba
24.02.2020

Yes, but could you get to work on time if the Moon looked like this? As the photographer was preparing to drive to work, refraction, reflection, and even diffraction of moonlight from millions of falling ice crystals turned the familiar icon of our Moon into a menagerie of other-worldly halos and arcs.

The Center of Globular Cluster Omega Centauri
10.10.2001

What is left over after stars collide? To help answer this question, astronomers have been studying the center of the most massive ball of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. In the center of globular cluster Omega Centauri, stars are packed in 10,000 times more densely than near our Sun.

Hesiodus Sunrise Ray
27.03.2010

Stark shadows of mountains and crater walls stand out along the lunar terminator, or shadow line between night and day, in this telescopic image. Of course, if viewed from the lunar surface near the terminator line, the Sun would be rising and still close to the lunar horizon.

The Orion Bullets
10.01.2013

Cosmic bullets pierce the outskirts of the Orion Nebula some 1500 light-years distant in this sharp infrared close-up. Blasted out by energetic massive star formation the bullets, relatively dense, hot gas clouds about ten times the size of Pluto's orbit, are blue in the false color image.

NGST 10b: Discovery of a Doomed Planet
26.02.2020

This hot jupiter is doomed. Hot jupiters are giant planets like Jupiter that orbit much closer to their parent stars than Mercury does to our Sun. But some hot jupiters are more extreme than others. NGTS-10b, illustrated generically, is the closest and fastest-orbiting giant planet yet discovered, circling its home star in only 18 hours.

A Flight over Jupiter Near the Great Red Spot
19.10.2020

Are you willing to wait to see the largest and oldest known storm system in the Solar System? In the featured video, Jupiter's Great Red Spot finally makes its appearance 2 minutes and 12 seconds into the 5-minute video.

The Crew 8 Nebula
7.03.2024

Not the James Webb Space Telescope's latest view of a distant galactic nebula, this cloud of gas and dust dazzled spacecoast skygazers on March 3. The telephoto snapshot was taken minutes after the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket on the SpaceX Crew-8 mission, to the International Space Station.

RAPTOR Images GRB 021211
19.12.2002

On December 11 astronomers found one of the brightest and most distant explosions in the Universe - a gamma-ray burst - hiding in the glare of a relatively nearby star. The earliest image of the burst's visible light was caught by an earthbound RAPTOR (RAPid Telescopes for Optical Response).