#PPOD: This photo was taken by NASA's Bill Dunford near Malad City, Idaho, on May 11, 2024; the International Space Station appears as a white streak in this 8-second exposure. Credit: NASA/Bill Dunford
#PPOD: M51 (NGC 5194) lies about 27 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici and is trapped in a tumultuous relationship with its near neighbor, the dwarf galaxy NGC 5195. The interaction between these two galaxies has made these galactic neighbors one of the better-studied galaxy pairs in the night sky. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Adamo (Stockholm University) and the FEAST JWST team
#PPOD: As carbon dioxide frost sublimates with the warming Martian spring, a pattern emerges of dark brown sand dunes interspersed with the remaining bright frost. Image taken by the HiRISE camera onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona
#PPOD: This Hubble Space Telescope image shows boulders ejected from the asteroid Dimorphos after the DART spacecraft slammed into it in September 2022. The bright object with a tail is Dimorphos, and the tiny white dots clustered around it are boulders ranging in size from 1 to 6.7 meters (3 to 22 feet) in diameter. Credit: NASA, ESA, D. Jewitt (UCLA)
#PPOD: NASA's Voyager 1 probe launched in 1977 and is now the most distant human-made object from Earth, traveling through interstellar space. Recently, NASA engineers had to figure out why the probe was suddenly sending unreadable data. After nearly six months of analysis and re-programming, they got Voyager correctly transmitting again. Truly a feat of human ingenuity. Credit: Dave Granlund
#PPOD: In dark evening skies over June Lake, northern hemisphere, planet Earth, Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks stood just above the western horizon on March 30. Its twisted turbulent ion tail and diffuse greenish coma are captured in this two-degree wide telescopic field of view along with the bright yellowish star Hamal also known as Alpha Arietis. Credit: Dan Bartlett via APOD
#PPOD: This is how NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft saw Neptune, the other blue planet, in true color on 17 August 1989, based on a re-analysis of the original data by Patrick G J Irwin et al 2024. Credit: NASA/Voyager 2/PDS/OPUS/Ardenau4
#PPOD: The JunoCam instrument on NASA’s Juno captured this view of Jupiter’s moon Io — with the first-ever image of its south polar region — during the spacecraft’s 60th flyby of Jupiter on April 9, 2024, revealing mountains and lava lakes. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS; Image processing: Gerald Eichstädt/Thomas Thomopoulos
#PPOD: This photograph was taken by astronaut Alex Gerst on September 8, 2014, from the International Space Station. The ISS was over Libya at the time, and Gerst was looking south-southwest over a storm that stretched hundreds of kilometers across the sand seas of the Sahara. In the photo, winds appear to be coming out of the east or northeast (left), and the sun is setting to the west (right in this image). Credit: NASA/ESA/A. Gerst
Some mind-boggling details of a Martian impact crater taken by NASA's HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This image has everything: layers, boulders, dunes, and maybe some polygonal terrain, too. The blue filter is used here to learn about morphologies, textures, and composition.
#PPOD: This artist's concept illustrates Kepler-16b, the first planet known to definitively orbit two stars -- what's called a circumbinary planet. The planet, which can be seen in the foreground, was discovered by NASA's Kepler mission. The two orbiting stars regularly eclipse each other, as seen from our point of view on Earth. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle
#PPOD: Rising from turbulent waves of dust and gas is the Horsehead Nebula, Barnard 33, which resides roughly 1,300 light-years away, and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has captured the sharpest infrared images to date. Webb’s new view focuses on the illuminated edge of the top of the nebula’s distinctive dust and gas structure. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, K. Misselt (University of Arizona) and A. Abergel (IAS/University Paris-Saclay, CNRS)
#PPOD: View of the north polar region of Jupiter's moon Io, in approximate natural color, made from images captured with NASA's Galileo spacecraft on March 28, 1998. The background is filled with Jupiter's clouds. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ Galileo Imaging Team/Jason Major
#PPOD: ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst took this photo of a 13-kilometer (8-mile) wide impact crater in Chad from the International Space Station in 2020. Credit: ESA-A.Gerst
#PPOD: The final resting place of the Mars Ingenuity helicopter, imaged on 25 February 2024 by NASA's Perseverance rover's SuperCam Remote Micro-Imager. The helicopter flew for its 72nd and final time on 18 January 2024. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/IRAP/Paul Byrne
#PPOD: In celebration of the 34th anniversary of the launch of NASA’s legendary Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers took a snapshot of the Little Dumbbell Nebula, also known as Messier 76, or M76, located 3,400 light-years away in the northern circumpolar constellation Perseus. The name 'Little Dumbbell' comes from its shape which is a two-lobed structure of colorful, mottled, glowing gases resembling a balloon that’s been pinched around a middle waist. Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI
#PPOD: Check out this fun rock garden at Jezero! NASA's Perseverance rover captured this image of some interesting Martian rocks on Sept. 17, 2023. The image was selected by public vote as an "Image of the Week" for the mission. It has been edited to bring out more detail. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU / Edited by The Planetary Society
#PPOD: In this image released on March 9, 2024, the NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope gives us a more detailed view of a well-studied but still mysterious region, NGC 604. The most noticeable features are tendrils and clumps of emission that appear bright red, extending out from areas that look like clearings, or large bubbles in the nebula. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
#PPOD: Io is the volcanic moon of Jupiter and is seen here in an image taken in 1979 by NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft. Loki Patera is Io's largest volcanic depression at 202 kilometers in diameter and contains an active volcanic lake. Io's volcanism results from the gravitational forces being applied to the tiny moon by Jupiter on one side and the larger Galilean moons on the other. Credit: NASA/JPL/Voyager-ISS/ @andrealuck CC BY (https://www.flickr.com/photos/192271236@N03/53668923876/ )
#PPOD: How does a comet tail change? It depends on the comet. The ion tail of Comet 12P/Pons–Brooks has been changing markedly, as detailed in the featured image sequenced over nine days from March 6 to 14 (top to bottom). Reasons for tail changes include the rate of ejection of material from the comet's nucleus, the strength and complexity of the passing solar wind, and the rotation rate of the comet. Credit: Shengyu Li & Shaining via APOD
#PPOD: This near-infrared, color mosaic from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows the sun glinting off of Titan's north polar seas. The sunglint, a specular reflection, is the bright area near the 11 o'clock position at upper left. This mirror-like reflection, known as the specular point, is in the south of Titan's largest sea, Kraken Mare, just north of an island archipelago separating two separate parts of the sea. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/University of Idaho
#PPOD: Shown in the center of this image, Pan (28 kilometers) orbits within the Encke Gap of the A ring. Other bright specks in the image are background stars. As Saturn approaches its August 2009 equinox, the planet's moons cast shadows onto the rings. This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 51 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft on May 2, 2009. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute/CICLOPS
#PPOD: In the far southeast corner of Libya, in the Libyan Desert, lie the uplifted massifs of Jebel Awenat and Jebel Arkenu. Both expose ancient Precambrian rocks, intruded by granites and then overlain with sandstones. Folding and doming have produced these interesting shapes, rising above the surrounding sand sea. Presently, the area receives less than one inch of rain per year. Credit: NASA/METI/AIST/Japan Space Systems, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team
#PPOD: On April 8, 2024, a NASA photographer captured the total solar eclipse in Dallas. A small part of North America, from Mexico’s Pacific coast to the Atlantic coast of Newfoundland, Canada, saw the total solar eclipse, while all of North America and parts of Central America and Europe saw a partial solar eclipse. The next total solar eclipse that will travel across the lower 48 states from coast to coast is in 2045. Credit: NASA/Keegan Barber
#PPOD: The Moon's shadow, or umbra, is pictured covering portions of the Canadian provinces of Quebec and New Brunswick and the American state of Maine in this photograph from the International Space Station as it soared into the solar eclipse from 420 kilometers above the surface of Earth. The diameter of the shadow is 160 km. Credit: NASA