#PPOD: In this false-color image of Pluto, taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during its July 14, 2015 flyby, different colors represent different compositions of surface ices, revealing a surprisingly active body. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
#PPOD: Taken in 2016, this stunning composite photo shows the Milky Way stretching above the Isar River in Germany as well as the stunning landscape beneath the river's surface. Photographer Johannes Holzer used a star tracker to capture the night sky and a Sony A7r in a water-case to get the underwater scenery. Both exposures took 300 seconds. We think you'll agree that the result is beautiful. Credit: Johannes Holzer
#PPOD: This view of Jupiter's moon Callisto, captured by NASA's Galileo spacecraft on 25 June 1997, shows the 350-km-long Gomul Catena crater chain—the result of a comet that broke apart just before impact into what appears to be at least 26-27 separate major pieces! Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Jason Major
#PPOD: Please enjoy this amazing shot of the International Space Station passing in front of the Sun. Several solar prominences are also visible. If you look closely, you can also see the Dragon capsule docked to the ISS (inset, upper right). Credit & Copyright: Mehmet Ergün
#PPOD: NASA’s JWST has gazed at the Crab Nebula in the search for answers about the supernova remnant’s origins. Similar to the Hubble optical wavelength image released in 2005, with Webb the remnant appears comprised of a crisp, cage-like structure of fluffy red-orange filaments of gas that trace doubly ionized sulfur (sulfur III). Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Tea Temim (Princeton University)
#PPOD: This oblique view of the Moon was taken from the Lunar Module during the Apollo 12 mission on 1969-11-19 and shows the 107 km diameter Copernicus crater near the horizon at the center of the frame. Reinhold crater, 42 km across, is in the foreground. The Carpathian mountain range is visible on the horizon at the lower left. This area is just to the north of the Apollo 12 landing site. The view is looking northeast. Credit: NASA
#PPOD: If you look carefully, you can see a small, bright object just left of center in this image. Can you spot it? That's NASA's Curiosity rover, photographed from Mars orbit. This image was taken by the HiRISE camera onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on 18 April 2021. The image has a resolution of 25 cm per pixel, and north is up. At the time the image was taken, MRO was 269 km above the rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona/Paul Byrne
#PPOD: This 2006 Gemini Observatory image shows Jupiter’s two giant “red” spots brushing past one another in the planet’s southern hemisphere. In the near-infrared, the red spots appear white rather than the reddish hue seen at visible wavelengths and both are massive storm systems. The larger one is the Great Red Spot and the smaller is Oval BA, which no longer exists. Credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA/NSF
#PPOD: This near-infrared view of Saturn and the rings was taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in July 2017. Saturn is also showing ‘ringshine’, light reflected off the rings and onto the night side of the planet. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill
#PPOD: This composite photograph is an eclipse sequence taken during last month's annular solar eclipse as the Moon was overtaking the rising Sun in the sky over Factory Butte in Utah. The rays flaring out from the Sun are an illusory result of camera aperture diffraction. The Moon is artificially brightened to enhance its outline -- which helps the viewer better visualize the Moon's changing position during this ring-of-fire eclipse. Credit: MaryBeth Kiczenski via APOD
#PPOD: Saturn's moon Mimas is seen orbitally setting beyond the limb of its larger sibling Dione from the point of view of NASA's Cassini spacecraft on December 12, 2011. Mimas was about 515,000 km away from Dione when this image was captured. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/J.Major
#PPOD: Captured during perijove 26, NASA's Juno spacecraft spotted some stunning clouds and storms swirling on the surface of Jupiter. Taken by #JunoCam. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill
#PPOD: In 1572, Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe was among those who noticed a new bright object in the constellation Cassiopeia, but Tycho's "new" star was not new at all. Rather it signaled the death of a star in a supernova, an explosion so bright that it can outshine the light from an entire galaxy. As with many supernova remnants, the Tycho supernova remnant glows brightly in X-ray light. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/RIKEN & GSFC/T. Sato et al; Optical: DSS
#PPOD: Exploring the universe from a backyard in Arizona! Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy captured the International Space Station slipping across the Moon's face as it flies by at 8 kilometers per second, gently kissing Tycho crater. That crater is 53 miles wide, so while the station almost looks like it's orbiting the moon, it's actually 1000x closer to us. What a shot! Credit: Andrew McCarthy
#PPOD: Images from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) show a water vapor plume jetting from the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, extending out 40 times the size of the moon itself. The inset, an image from the Cassini orbiter, emphasizes how small Enceladus appears in the Webb image compared to the water plume. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, G. Villanueva (NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center), A. Pagan (STScI)
#PPOD: This gorgeous composite photo of the recent annular eclipse was taken on October 14, 2023, from Reflection Canyon in Utah. The relative size of the Sun is purely artistic. Credit: Byron Mead
#PPOD: This image was taken by the Hayabusa2 spacecraft's MINERVA-II-b rover ("OWL") as it bounced across the surface of the asteroid 162173 Ryugu on 23 September 2018. Each bounce lasted about 15 minutes, in which time the tiny rover covered about 15 meters. Credit: JAXA
#PPOD: The 30km-wide crater Adivar on Venus was imaged in synthetic aperture radar by NASA's Magellan spacecraft (1989–1994). To make this version, Jason Major inverted the black-and-white radar image, used noise reduction, and colored it to a "Venus" palette (based on Venera images.) Credit: NASA / Magellan images / J. Major
What an amazing landscape our Curiosity continues to explore on Mount Sharp at Gale Crater. This butte has been carved a few times by something that seems related to cycles, so likely climate-related. Who knows? Maybe ice! It looks weird to be only the result of aeolian erosion, but it certainly makes for an interesting and stunning landscape. Taken with MastCam on Sol 3589.
#PPOD: Here is one of the mirrors of the Giant Magellan Telescope being readied at the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab in Tucson, AZ! Using seven of the world’s largest mirrors, the Giant Magellan Telescope will have 50 million times the light-gathering power of the human eye and will be up to 200 times more powerful than today’s best telescopes!
Credit: Nathalie A. Cabrol
Caption: The Giant Magellan Telescope
#PPOD: This infrared view of Jupiter was created from data captured on 11 January 2017 with the Near-InfraRed Imager instrument at Gemini North in Hawaiʻi. In the image, warmer areas appear bright, including four large hot spots that appear in a row just north of the equator. South of the equator, the oval-shaped and cloud-covered Great Red Spot appears dark.
Credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, M.H. Wong (UC Berkeley) et al.; Acknowledgments: M. Zamani
#PPOD: The sample return capsule from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission is seen shortly after touching down in the desert, Sunday, Sept. 24, 2023, at the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range. The sample was collected from the asteroid Bennu in October 2020 by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. On Wednesday, Oct. 11, NASA will unveil the sample and host a media teleconference with experts from the agency and the University of Arizona. Credit: NASA/Keegan Barber
#PPOD: This cutout from the new JWST short-wavelength infrared image of the Orion Nebula shows bright 'fingers' of gas racing away from an explosion that occurred roughly 500 to 1000 years ago in the heart of a dense molecular cloud behind the nebula, perhaps as two young massive stars collided. The dense cloud is called Orion Molecular Cloud 1 and lies to the northwest of the visible Trapezium stars in Orion. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA; Science leads and image processing: M. McCaughrean, S. Pearson