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To find and view past APODs, tap here:t.me/apodQA/3NASA's APOD presence in Telegram🌐apod.nasa.govEach day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
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2025 November 11
Jupiter in Ultraviolet from Hubble
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble; Processing & License: Judy Schmidt
Jupiter looks a bit different in ultraviolet light. To better interpret Jupiter's cloud motions and to help NASA's robotic Juno spacecraft understand the planetary context of the small fields that it sees, the Hubble Space Telescope was being directed to regularly image the entire Jovian giant. The colors of Jupiter being monitored go beyond the normal human visual range to include both ultraviolet and (not pictured) infrared light. Featured from 2017, Jupiter appears different in near ultraviolet light, partly because the amount of sunlight reflected back is distinct, giving differing cloud heights and latitudes discrepant brightnesses. In the near UV, Jupiter's poles appear relatively dark, as does its Great Red Spot and a smaller (optically) white oval to the right. The String of Pearl storms farther to the right, however, are brightest in near ultraviolet, and so here appear (false-color) pink. Jupiter's largest moon Ganymede appears on the upper left. Juno continues on a looping 33-day orbit around Jupiter, while Earth-orbiting Hubble is aging and now relies on a single stabilizing gyroscope.
Tomorrow's picture: blue blue Jupiter
2025 November 10
Micro Moon vs. Super Moon
Image Credit & Copyright: Şenol Şanlı"
What was so super about Wednesday's supermoon? Last week, a full moon occurred that appeared slightly larger and brighter than usual. The reason is that the Moon's fully illuminated phase occurred within a short time from perigee - when the Moon was its closest to the Earth in its elliptical orbit. Although the precise conditions that define a supermoon vary, last Wednesday's supermoon was surely the closest, largest, and brightest full moon this year. One reason supermoons are popular is because they are so easy to see -- just go outside at sunset and watch an impressive full moon rise! Pictured here, Wednesday's supermoon is compared to April's micro moon -- when a full Moon occurs near the furthest part of the Moon's orbit -- so that it appears slightly smaller and dimmer than usual. Given many definitions, at least one supermoon occurs each year, with another one coming next month (moon-th).
Tomorrow's picture: big moon
2025 November 9
Road to the Galactic Center
Image Credit & Copyright: Michael Abramyan
Does the road to our galaxy's center go through Monument Valley? It doesn't have to, but if your road does -- take a picture. In this case, the road is US Route 163 and iconic buttes on the Navajo National Reservation populate the horizon. The band of Milky Way Galaxy stretches down from the sky and appears to be a continuation of the road on Earth. Filaments of dust darken the Milky Way, in contrast to billions of bright stars and several colorful glowing gas clouds including the Lagoon and Trifid nebulas. The featured picture is a composite of images taken with the same camera and from the same location -- Forest Gump Point in Utah, USA. The foreground was taken just after sunset in early 2021 September during the blue hour, while the background is a mosaic of four exposures captured a few hours later.
Tomorrow's picture: on the road
2025 November 8
A Full Moon at Perigee
Image Credit & Copyright: Betul Turksoy
What is big, bright, and beautiful, can wear a cape made of clouds, and is at the closest point in its elliptical orbit around planet Earth? A full moon at perigee of course, captured here near moonset in predawn skies on November 5 from Kayseri, Turkiye. Full moons that happen at (or very near) perigee, and so are slightly larger and brighter than full moons on average, have become popularly known as supermoons. In fact, this full moon at perigee is the closest and brightest of the three supermoons of 2025. Rising as the Sun sets, this full moon follows this October's Harvest Moon and is traditionally known to some as the Hunter's Moon.
Tomorrow's picture: perigee moon
2025 November 7
A Dark Seahorse in Cepheus
Image Credit & Copyright: Jordi Jofre
Spanning light-years, this suggestive shape known as the Seahorse Nebula floats in silhouette against a rich background of stars and glowing hydrogen gas. Seen toward the royal northern constellation of Cepheus, the dusty, dark nebula is part of a Milky Way molecular cloud some 1,200 light-years distant. It is also listed as Barnard 150 (B150), one of 182 dark markings of the sky cataloged in the early 20th century by astronomer E. E. Barnard. Packs of low mass stars are forming within, but their collapsing cores are only visible at long infrared wavelengths. Still, the luminous depths of the Milky Way in Cepheus add to this stunning galactic skyscape.
2025 November 6
NGC 253: Dusty Island Universe
Image Credit & Copyright: Adam Block
Shiny NGC 253 is one of the brightest spiral galaxies visible, and also one of the dustiest. Some call it the Silver Coin Galaxy for its appearance in small telescopes, or just the Sculptor Galaxy for its location within the boundaries of the southern constellation Sculptor. Discovered in 1783 by mathematician and astronomer Caroline Herschel, the dusty island universe lies a mere 10 million light-years away. About 70 thousand light-years across, NGC 253 is the largest member of the Sculptor Group of Galaxies, the nearest to our own Local Group of Galaxies. In addition to its spiral dust lanes, tendrils of dust seem to be rising from its galactic disk laced with young star clusters and star forming regions in this colorful galaxy portrait. The high dust content accompanies frantic star formation, earning NGC 253 the designation of a starburst galaxy. NGC 253 is also known to be a strong source of high-energy x-rays and gamma rays, likely due to black holes near the galaxy's center.
2025 November 5
Spiral Galaxy NGC 3370 from Hubble
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Riess, K. Noll
Is this what our own Milky Way Galaxy looks like from far away? Similar in size and grand design to our home Galaxy (although without the central bar), spiral galaxy NGC 3370 lies about 100 million light-years away toward the constellation of the Lion (Leo). Recorded here in exquisite detail by the Hubble Space Telescope, the big, beautiful face-on spiral is not only photogenic, but has proven sharp enough to study individual stars known as Cepheids. These pulsating stars have been used to accurately determine NGC 3370's distance. NGC 3370 was chosen for this study because in 1994 the spiral galaxy was also home to a well studied stellar explosion -- a Type Ia supernova. Combining the known distance to this standard candle supernova, based on the Cepheid measurements, with observations of supernovas at even greater distances has helped to reveal the size and expansion rate of the entire Universe itself.
Tomorrow's picture: spiraling stars
2025 November 4
Comet Lemmon Beyond Lomnický Peak
Image Credit & Copyright: Robert Barsa
Comet Lemmon has been putting on a show for cameras around the globe. Passing nearest to Earth in late October, the photogenic comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) sprouted two long and picturesque tails: a blue ion tail and a white dust tail. The ion tail is pushed away from the coma by the ever-present but ever-changing solar wind, at one point extending over 20 times the diameter of the full Moon -- as captured in this long-duration exposure. The shorter and wider dust tail is pushed away from the coma and shines by reflecting sunlight. The featured picture, captured two weeks ago, framed the comet behind Lomnický Peak of the High Tatra Mountains, home to the Slovakian Lomnický Stit Observatory. Comet Lemmon is now fading as it heads away from planet Earth. The huge shedding snowball will round the Sun later this week.
Tomorrow's picture: comet sky
2025 November 3
A Double Helix Lunar Eclipse
Image Credit & Copyright: Chunlin Liu
The image was timed to capture a total lunar eclipse -- but it came with quite a twist. First, the eclipse: the fully Earth-shadowed Moon is visible as the orange orb near the top. The eclipsed Moon's orange color is caused by a slight amount of red light scattered first by Earth's atmosphere, adding a color like a setting Sun. Now, the twist: one of the apparent double helix bands is the Milky Way, the central disk of our home galaxy. The second band is zodiacal light, sunlight scattered by dust in our Solar System. The reason they cross is because the plane where dust orbits our Sun is tilted relative to the plane where stars orbit our Galaxy. This well-known tilt is shown dramatically in the featured wide-angle Mercator-projected picture, spanning from horizon to horizon, captured in early September from Mingantu Observing Station in Inner Mongolia, China.
Tomorrow's picture: double helix eclipse
2025 November 2
A Horseshoe Einstein Ring from Hubble
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
What's large and blue and can wrap itself around an entire galaxy? A gravitational lens mirage. Pictured here, the gravity of a massive elliptical galaxy (luminous red galaxy: LRG) has gravitationally distorted the light from a much more distant blue galaxy. More typically, such light bending results in two discernible images of the distant galaxy, but here the lens alignment is so precise that the background galaxy is distorted into a horseshoe -- a nearly complete ring: an Einstein ring. Although LRG 3-757 was discovered in 2007 in data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the image shown above is a follow-up observation taken with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3. A recent lens analysis of the central galaxy indicates that it likely hosts the single most massive black hole yet discovered: 36 billion times the mass of our Sun.
Tomorrow's picture: gravity's horseshoe
2025 November 1
Pleiades from Planet Earth
Image Credit & Copyright: Max Inwood
The lovely Pleiades star cluster shines in Earth's night sky, a compact group of stars some 400 light-years distant toward the constellation Taurus and the Orion Arm of our Milky Way galaxy. Recognized since ancient times, the remarkable celestial gathering is visible to the unaided eye. The Pleiades cluster is also well-placed for viewing from both northern and southern hemispheres, and over the centuries has become connected to many cultural traditions and celebrations, including the cross-quarter day celebration Halloween. In Greek myth, the Pleiades were seven daughters of the astronomical titan Atlas and sea-nymph Pleione. Galileo first sketched the star cluster viewed through his telescope with stars too faint to be seen by eye and Charles Messier recorded the position of the cluster as the 45th entry in his well-known catalog of things which are not comets. In this dramatic night skyscape from planet Earth, the stars of the Pleiades appear embedded in dusty blue reflection nebulae, poised above Mt Sefton, one of the tallest peaks in New Zealand. There known as Matariki, the star cluster is associated with the celebration of the Maori new year.
Tomorrow's picture: seven spooky sisters
