NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day✔

2026 October 31 Night on a Spooky Planet Image Credit & Copyright: Stéphane Vetter (Nuits sacrées) What spooky planet is this? Planet Earth on a dark and stormy night, of course. The ghostly scene was photographed at Hverir, a geothermally active area found along northeastern Iceland's volcanic landscape. Triggered by solar activity, geomagnetic storms have unleashed energetic particles trapped in Earth's magnetic field. Penetrating the planet's upper atmosphere at high latitudes, the particle…

Tomorrow's picture: night on a spooky planet 👻

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2026 October 30 Haunting the Cepheus Flare Image Credit & Copyright: Mirko Tondinelli Spooky shapes seem to haunt this dusty expanse, drifting through the night in the royal constellation Cepheus. Of course, the shapes are cosmic dust clouds visible in dimly reflected starlight. Far from your own neighborhood, they lurk above the plane of the Milky Way at the edge of the Cepheus Flare molecular cloud complex some 1,200 light-years away. Over 2 light-years across and brighter than most of the o…

2026 October 29 The Horns of Venus Image Credit & Copyright: Thierry Legault That's no moon. But you could be forgiven for thinking it was a crescent Moon in the sky. It is a lesser known fact that Venus also has phases. (What about other planets?) The featured image shows Venus seen almost directly between the Sun and the Earth. This happens once every year and a half, and it is like the alignment that happens every month during a new Moon. But the new Moon is dark, while Venus' backlit atmos…

Tomorrow's picture: a planet grows horns

2026 October 28 The Mutual Occultation of Ganymede and Io Image Credit & Copyright: Michael Wong Jupiter is one of the least lonely planets in the Solar System, at least when it comes to natural satellites. 115 moons have been discovered orbiting Jupiter so far! (Saturn has the most with 293, but who’s counting.) Ganymede and Io, two of Jupiter’s Galilean moons, met in the sky on October 20th, 2026. Today’s video captures the meeting, with Ganymede briefly blocking Io from view. This event, wh…

Tomorrow's picture: round and round

2026 October 27 Noctilucent Clouds over Sweden Credit & Copyright: V. Höfer, D. Večerník & B. Večerníková Sometimes it's night on the ground but day in the air. As the Earth rotates to eclipse the Sun, sunset rises up from the ground. Therefore, at sunset on the ground, sunlight still shines on clouds above. Under usual circumstances, a pretty sunset might be visible, but unusual noctilucent clouds float so high up they can be seen well after dark. Normally too dim to be seen, they may become …

2026 October 26 M42: The Great Nebula in Orion Credit & Copyright: Roberto Palaia The Great Nebula in Orion, an immense, nearby starbirth region, is one the most famous of all astronomical nebulas. Here, glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1500 light-years away. In the featured deep image in assigned colors highlighted by emission in hydrogen, wisps and sheets of dust and gas are particularly evident. The Great Nebula in Orion can b…

Tomorrow's picture: Orion the Great

📎 Media

2026 October 25 Dark Matter in a Simulated Universe Illustration Credit & Copyright: Tom Abel & Ralf Kaehler (KIPAC, SLAC), AMNH Is our universe haunted? It might look that way on this dark matter map. The gravity of unseen dark matter is the leading explanation for why galaxies rotate so fast, why galaxies orbit clusters so fast, why gravitational lenses so strongly deflect light, and how visible matter is distributed. The featured image from the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Pl…

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2026 October 24 Rosetta's Selfie Image Credit & Copyright: ESA/Rosetta/Philae/CIVA This Rosetta spacecraft selfie was snapped on October 7th, 2014. At the time the comet-chasing spacecraft was about 472 million kilometers from planet Earth, but only 16 kilometers from the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Looming beyond the spacecraft near the top of the frame, dust and gas stream away from the comet's curious double-lobed nucleus. Bright sunlight glints off one of Rosetta's 14 meter…

2026 October 23 Andromeda in Southern Spring Image Credit & Copyright: Lucy Yunxi Hu Looking toward the north from Mullion, New South Wales, Australia, the Andromeda Galaxy never gets more than a few degrees above the horizon. During the southern hemisphere spring, Andromeda is highest in the sky around midnight though. And in this telephoto scene from October 10/11, multiple exposures were used to reveal the spiral galaxy in tantalizing detail as it climbed above rolling Australian hills. Als…

Tomorrow's picture: eye in the sky

2026 October 22 The First Green Star, WD J1330+6435 Image Credit & Copyright: Mark A. Garlick/University of Warwick Star light, star bright: is there a green star out tonight? Other than the Sun, all stars are so far from Earth that they appear as points in the sky. They are mostly white, but sometimes noticeably red or blue. This color typically relates to the temperature: blue stars are hotter than red stars. What about other colors? The featured image is an illustration showing WD J1330+643…

Tomorrow's picture: it's not easy being green

2026 October 21 New Ghosts Revealed in Cassiopeia Image Credit & Copyright: Louis Leroux-Géré, Thibault Rouillée, Vincent Martin, Cédric de Decker (Starfront Observatories) Jinkies, look at all those ghosts! It took 100 hours of observation and a special oxygen filter for today’s image to capture three faint nebulas hidden in the Cassiopeia constellation. IC 59 and IC 63, the original Ghosts of Cassiopeia, haunt the region near multi-star system γ Cassiopeia. Energetic light from γ Cassiopeia …