Yogi and Friends in 3D
10.05.2025

This picture from July 1997 shows a ramp from the Pathfinder lander, the Sojourner robot rover, deflated landing airbags, a couch, Barnacle Bill and Yogi Rock appear together in this 3D stereo view of the surface of Mars. Barnacle Bill is the rock just left of the house cat-sized, solar-paneled Sojourner.

APOD: 2025 May 21 Б International Space Station Crosses the Sun
21.05.2025

Typically, the International Space Station is visible only at night. Slowly drifting across the night sky as it orbits the Earth, the International Space Station (ISS) can be seen as a bright spot about once a month from many locations.

AFGL 2591: A Massive Star Acts Up
29.08.2001

Young star AFGL 2591 is putting on a show. The massive star is expelling outer layers of dust-laced gas as gravity pulls inner material toward the surface. AFGL 2591 is estimated to be about...

The Water Vapor Channel
23.03.2002

What alien planet's bizarre landscape lurks below these fiery-looking clouds? It's only planet Earth, of course ... as seen on the Water Vapor Channel. Hourly, images like this one (an infrared image shown in false-color) are brought to you by the orbiting Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites' (GOES) multi-channel imagers.

Vesta Vista
19.07.2011

What does the surface of asteroid Vesta look like? The brightest asteroid in the Solar System and the object which takes up about 10 percent of the entire mass of the main asteroid belt had never been seen up close before.

Moon and Planets Over Catalonia
29.02.2012

Venus and Jupiter will appear unusually close in the sky over the next month. The planetary conjunction will be easily visible to the unaided eye because Venus will appear brighter than any background star, and Jupiter will be nearly as bright. To see the near-alignment, simply look to the west after sunset.

Meteors and Aurorae over Iceland
7.08.2013

What's going on behind that volcano? Quite a bit. First of all, the volcano itself, named Kirkjufell, is quite old and located in western Iceland near the town of GrundarfjЖrПur. In front...

Pluto: From Mountains to Plains
14.12.2015

What do the sharpest views ever of Pluto show? As the robotic New Horizons spacecraft moves into the outer Solar System, it is now sending back some of the highest resolution images from its historic encounter with Pluto in July. Featured here is one recently-received, high-resolution image.

APOD Turns Eighteen
16.06.2013

The first APOD appeared eighteen years ago today, on 1995 June 16. Although garnering only 14 pageviews on that day, we are proud to estimate that APOD has now served over one billion space-related images over the past eighteen years.

Air Pollution Earth
9.07.2001

Where on Earth is the air most polluted? Recently released images from the Terra satellite show not only areas of high pollution, but also how polluted air moves. In the above image, locations of higher air pollution are shown in red. The pollutant tracked is carbon monoxide (CO) at a height of about 5 kilometers.