#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