juliensimon/nasa-apod huggingface dataset:
Orion and the Running Man (2025-11-13)

Few cosmic vistas can excite the imagination like The Great Nebula in Orion. Visible as a faint, bland celestial smudge to the naked-eye, the nearest large star-forming region sprawls across this sharp colorful telescopic image. Designated M42 in the Messier Catalog, the Orion Nebula's glowing gas and dust surrounds hot, young stars. About 40 light-years across, M42 is at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1,500 light-years away that lies within the same spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy as the Sun. Including dusty bluish reflection nebula NGC 1977, also known as the Running Man nebula at left in the frame, the natal nebulae represent only a small fraction of our galactic neighborhood's wealth of star-forming material. Within the well-studied stellar nursery, astronomers have also identified what appear to be numerous infant solar systems.

Image credit: R. Jay Gabany
Florida Northern Lights (2025-11-14)

Northern lights have come to Florida skies. In fact, the brilliant streak of a Northern Taurid meteor flashes through the starry night sky above the beach in this sea and skyscape, captured from Shired Island, Florida on November 11. Meteors from the annual Northern Taurid meteor shower are expected this time of year. But the digital camera exposure also records the shimmering glow of aurora, a phenomenon more often seen from our fair planet's higher geographical latitudes. Also known as aurora borealis, these northern lights are part of recent, wide spread auroral activity caused by strong geomagnetic storms. In the last few days, stormy spaceweather has been triggered by multiple Earth impacting coronal mass ejections and intense solar activity.

Image credit: Samil Cabrera
Andromeda and Friends (2025-11-15)

This magnificent extragalactic skyscape looks toward the Andromeda Galaxy, the closest large spiral galaxy to the Milky Way. It also accomplishes a Messier catalog trifecta by including Andromeda, cataloged as Messier 31 (M31), along with Messier 32 (M32), and Messier 110 (M110) in the same telescopic field of view.  In this frame, M32 is just left of the Andromeda Galaxy's bright core with M110 below and to the right. M32 and M110 are both elliptical galaxies themselves and satellites of the larger spiral Andromeda. By combining 60 hours of broadband and narrowband image data, the deep telescopic view also reveals tantalizing details of dust lanes, young star clusters, and star-forming regions along Andromeda's spiral arms, and faint, foreground clouds of glowing hydrogen gas. For now, Andromeda and friends are some 2.5 million light-years from our own large spiral Milky Way.   Fun Fact: It has been 11,111 days since APOD was founded.

Image credit: Piotr Czerski
Crossing Saturn's Ring Plane (2025-11-16)

If this is Saturn, where are the rings?  When Saturn's "appendages" disappeared in 1612, Galileo did not understand why.   Later that century, it became understood that Saturn's unusual protrusions were rings and that when the Earth crosses the ring plane, the edge-on rings will appear to disappear.  This is because Saturn's rings are confined to a plane many times thinner, in proportion, than a razor blade.  In modern times, the robotic Cassini spacecraft that orbited Saturn frequently crossed Saturn's ring plane during its mission to Saturn, from 2004 to 2017.  A series of plane crossing images from 2005 February was dug out of the vast online Cassini raw image archive by interested Spanish amateur Fernando Garcia Navarro.  Pictured here, digitally cropped and set in representative colors, is the striking result.  Saturn's thin ring plane appears in blue, bands and clouds in Saturn's upper atmosphere appear in gold. Details of Saturn's rings can be seen in high dark shadows.  The moons Dione and Enceladus appear as bumps in the rings.
Comet Lemmon's Wandering Tail (2025-11-17)

What has happened to Comet Lemmon's tail? The answer is blowing in the wind — the wind from the Sun in this case. This continuous outflow of charged particles from the Sun has been quite variable of late, as the Sun emits bursts of energy, CMEs, that push out and deflect charged particles emitted by the comet itself. The result is a blue hued ion tail for Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) that is not only impressively intricate but takes some unusual turns. This long-duration composite image taken from Alfacar, Spain last month captured this inner Solar System ionic tumult. Comet Lemmon is now fading as it heads out away from the Earth and Sun and back into the outer Solar System.
The Galactic Plane: Radio Versus Visible (2025-11-18)

What does the Milky Way look like in radio waves? To better find out, GLEAM surveyed the central band of our galaxy in high resolution radio light as imaged by the Murchison Widefield Array in Australia.  As the featured video slowly scrolls, radio light (71 - 231 MHz) is seen on the left and visible light -- from the same field -- on the right. Differences are so great because most objects glow differently in radio and visible light, and because visible light is stopped by nearby interstellar dust. These differences are particularly apparent in the direction toward the center of our galaxy, seen about a third of the way through.  Among the many features that appear in the radio, bright red patches are usually supernova remnants of exploded stars, while areas colored blue are stellar nurseries filled with bright young stars.    Did you know: APOD is available from numerous sites, including social media?
Chamaeleon Dark Nebulas (2025-11-19)

Sometimes the dark dust of interstellar space has an angular elegance.  Such is the case toward the far-south constellation of Chamaeleon. Normally too faint to see, dark dust is best known for blocking visible light from stars and galaxies behind it. In this 11.4-hour exposure, however, the dust is seen mostly in light of its own, with its strong red and near-infrared colors creating a brown hue. Contrastingly blue, a bright star Beta Chamaeleontis is visible on the upper right of the V, with the dust that surrounds it preferentially reflecting blue light from its primarily blue-white color.  All of the pictured stars and dust occur in our own Milky Way Galaxy with one notable exception: a white spot just below Beta Chamaeleontis is the galaxy IC 3104, which lies far in the distance.  Interstellar dust is mostly created in the cool atmospheres of giant stars and dispersed into space by stellar light, stellar winds, and stellar explosions such as supernovas.

Image credit: Xinran Li & 
Houbo Zhao
Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka (2025-11-20)

Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka are the bright bluish stars from east to west (upper right to lower left) along the diagonal in this cosmic vista. Otherwise known as the Belt of Orion, these three blue supergiant stars are hotter and much more massive than the Sun. They lie from 700 to 2,000 light-years away, born of Orion's well-studied interstellar clouds. In fact, clouds of gas and dust adrift in this region have some surprisingly familiar shapes, including the dark Horsehead Nebula and Flame Nebula near Alnitak at the upper right. The famous Orion Nebula itself is off the right edge of this colorful starfield. The telescopic frame spans almost 4 degrees on the sky.

Image credit: Aygen Erkaslan
3I/ATLAS: A View from Planet Earth (2025-11-21)

Now outbound after its perihelion or closest approach to the Sun on October 29, Comet 3I/ATLAS is only the third known interstellar object to pass through our fair Solar System. Its greenish coma and faint tails are seen against a background of stars in the constellation Virgo in this view from planet Earth, recorded with a small telescope on November 14. But this interstellar interloper is the subject of an on-going, unprecedented Solar System-wide observing campaign involving spacecraft and space telescopes from Earth orbit to the surface of Mars and beyond. And while the comet from another star-system has recently grown brighter, you'll still need a telescope if you want to see 3I/ATLAS from planet Earth. It's now above the horizon in November morning skies and will make its closest approach to Earth, a comfortable 270 million kilometers distant, around December 19.

Image credit: Rolando Ligustri
Dione and Rhea Ring Transit (2025-11-22)

Seen to the left of Saturn's banded planetary disk, small icy moons Dione and Rhea are caught passing in front of the gas giant's extensive ring system in this sharp telescopic snapshot. The remarkable image was recorded on November 20, when Saturn's rings were nearly edge-on when viewed from planet Earth. In fact, every 13 to 16 years the view from planet Earth aligns with Saturn's ring plane to produce a series of ring plane crossings. During a ring plane crossing, the interplanetary edge-on perspective makes the thin but otherwise bright rings seem to disappear. Saturn itself was close to the Sun on the sky and difficult to see this year, during the last ring plane crossing on March 23. But by November 23rd Saturn's rings will have reached a minimum angle for now, at their narrowest for viewing from planet Earth, and then start to widen again. Of course, Dione and Rhea orbit Saturn near the ring plane once every 2.7 and 4.5 days respectively, while the next series of Saturn ring plane crossings as seen from Earth will begin again in 2038.

Image credit: Christopher Go
The Observable Universe (2025-11-23)

How far can you see? Everything you can see, and everything you could possibly see, right now, assuming your eyes could detect all types of radiations around you -- is the observable universe.  In light, the farthest we can see comes from the cosmic microwave background, a time 13.8 billion years ago when the universe was opaque like thick fog. Some neutrinos and gravitational waves that surround us come from even farther out, but humanity does not yet have the technology to detect them. The featured image illustrates the observable universe on an increasingly compact scale, with the Earth and Sun at the center surrounded by our Solar System, nearby stars, nearby galaxies, distant galaxies, filaments of early matter, and the cosmic microwave background. Cosmologists typically assume that our observable universe is just the nearby part of a greater entity known as "the universe" where the same physics applies.  However, there are several lines of popular but speculative reasoning that assert that even our universe is part of a greater multiverse where either different physical constants occur, different physical laws apply, higher dimensions operate, or slightly different-by-chance versions of our standard universe exist.   Explore the Observable Universe: Random APOD Generator
Apep: Unusual Dust Shells from Webb (2025-11-24)

What created this unusual space sculpture? Stars. This unusual system of swirls and shells, known as Apep, was observed in unprecedented detail by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in infrared light in 2024. Observations indicate that the unusual shape originates from two massive Wolf-Rayet stars orbiting each other every 190 years with each close passes causing a new shell of dust and gas to be expelled. Holes in these shells are thought to be caused by a third orbiting star. This stellar dust dance will likely continue for hundreds of thousands of years, possibly ending only when one of the massive stars runs out of internal nuclear fuel and explodes in a supernova punctuated by a burst of gamma-rays.   Build your own star system: Astronomy Puzzle of the Day
Comet Lemmon and the Milky Way (2025-11-25)

What did Comet Lemmon look like when it was at its best? One example is pictured here, featuring three celestial spectacles all at different distances. The closest spectacle is the snowcapped Meili Mountains, part of the Himalayas in China.  The middle marvel is Comet Lemmon near its picturesque best early this month, showing not only a white dust tail trailing off to the right but its blue solar wind-distorted ion tail trailing off to the left.  Far in the distance on the left is the magnificent central plane of our Milky Way Galaxy, featuring dark dust, red nebula, and including billions of Sun-like stars. Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) is already fading as it heads back into the outer Solar System, while the Himalayan mountains will gradually erode over the next billion years. The Milky Way Galaxy, though, will live on -- forming new mountains and comets -- for many billions of years into the future.

Image credit: Lin Zixuan 
(Tsinghua U.)
Globular Cluster M15 Deep Field (2025-11-26)

Stars, like bees, swarm around the center of bright globular cluster M15.  The central ball of over 100,000 stars is a relic from the early years of our Galaxy, and continues to orbit the Milky Way's center.  M15, one of about 150 globular clusters remaining, is noted for being easily visible with only binoculars, having at its center one of the densest concentrations of stars known, and containing a high abundance of variable stars and pulsars.  The featured image of M15 was taken by combining very long exposures -- 122 hours in all -- and so brings up faint wisps of gas and dust in front of the giant ball of stars. M15 lies about 35,000 light years away toward the constellation of the Winged Horse (Pegasus).    Almost Hyperspace: Random APOD Generator

Image credit: Alvaro Ibanez Perez
Portrait of NGC 1055 (2025-11-27)

Big, beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 1055 is a dominant member of a small galaxy group a mere 60 million light-years away toward the aquatically intimidating constellation Cetus. Seen edge-on, the island universe spans over 100,000 light-years, a little larger than our own Milky Way galaxy. The colorful, spiky stars decorating this cosmic portrait of NGC 1055 are in the foreground, well within the Milky Way. But telltale pinkish star forming regions and young blue star clusters are scattered through winding dust lanes along the distant galaxy's thin disk. With a smattering of even more distant background galaxies, the deep image also reveals a boxy halo that extends far above and below the central bulge and disk of NGC 1055. The halo itself is laced with faint, narrow structures, and could represent the mixed and spread out debris from a satellite galaxy disrupted by the larger spiral some 10 billion years ago.

Image credit: John Hayes
NGC 6888: The Crescent Nebula (2025-11-28)

NGC 6888, also known as the Crescent Nebula, is a about 25 light-years across, a cosmic bubble blown by winds from its central, massive star. This deep telescopic image includes narrowband image data, to isolate light from hydrogen and oxygen atoms. The oxygen atoms produce the blue-green hue that seems to enshroud the nebula's detailed folds and filaments. Visible within the nebula, NGC 6888's central star is classified as a Wolf-Rayet star (WR 136). The star is shedding its outer envelope in a strong stellar wind, ejecting the equivalent of the Sun's mass every 10,000 years.  In fact, the Crescent Nebula's complex structures are likely the result of this strong wind interacting with material ejected in an earlier phase. Burning fuel at a prodigious rate and near the end of its stellar life, this star should ultimately go out with a bang in a spectacular supernova explosion. Found in the nebula rich constellation Cygnus, NGC 6888 is about 5,000 light-years away.

Image credit: Greg Bass
Moon Games (2025-11-29)

This is not a screen from a video game. Nestled below the treeline, the small mountain church does look like it might be hiding from Moon though. In the well-composed telephoto snapshot, taken on November 23, the church walls are partly reflecting light from terrestrial flood lights. Of course, the Moon is reflecting light from the Sun. At any given time the Sun illuminates fully half of the Moon's surface, also known as the lunar dayside, but on that night only a sliver of its sunlit surface was visible. About three days after New Moon, the Moon was in a waxing crescent phase. The single exposure was captured shortly after sunset in skies near Danta di Cadore, northern Italy, planet Earth.

Image credit: Giorgia Hofer
The Surface of Titan from Huygens (2025-11-30)

If you could stand on Titan -- what would you see? The featured color view from Titan gazes across an unfamiliar and distant landscape on Saturn's largest moon.  The scene was recorded by ESA's Huygens probe in 2005 after a 2.5-hour descent through a thick atmosphere of nitrogen laced with methane.  Bathed in an eerie orange light at ground level, rocks strewn about the scene could well be composed of water and hydrocarbons frozen solid at an inhospitable temperature of negative 179 degrees C.  The large light-toned rock below and left of center is only about 15 centimeters across and lies 85 centimeters away.  The saucer-shaped spacecraft is believed to have penetrated about 15 centimeters into a place on Titan's surface that had the consistency of wet sand or clay.  Huygen's batteries enabled the probe to take and transmit data for more than 90 minutes after landing.  Titan's bizarre chemical environment may bear similarities to planet Earth's before life evolved.
3I/ATLAS: Tails of an Interstellar Comet (2025-12-01)

How typical is our Solar System?  Studying 3I/ATLAS, a comet just passing through, is providing clues.  Confirmed previous interstellar visitors include an asteroid, a comet, a meteor, and a gas wind dominated by hydrogen and helium. Comet 3I/ATLAS appears relatively normal when compared to Solar System comets, therefore providing more evidence that our Solar System is a somewhat typical star system.  For example, Comet 3I/ATLAS has a broadly similar chemical composition and ejected dust. The featured image was captured last week from Texas and shows a green coma, a wandering blue-tinted ion tail likely deflected by our Sun's wind, and a slight anti-tail, all typical cometary attributes.  The comet, visible with a telescope, passed its closest to the Sun in late October and will pass its closest to the Earth in mid-December, after which it will return to interstellar space and never return.    Explore the Universe: Random APOD Generator

Image credit: Victor Sabet & 
Julien De Winter
M77: Spiral Galaxy with an Active Center (2025-12-02)

What's happening in the center of nearby spiral galaxy M77? The face-on galaxy lies a mere 47 million light-years away toward the constellation of the Sea Monster (Cetus).  At that estimated distance, this gorgeous island universe is about 100 thousand light-years across.  Also known as NGC 1068, its compact and very bright core is well studied by astronomers exploring the mysteries of supermassive black holes in active Seyfert galaxies.  M77's active core glows bright at x-ray, ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and radio wavelengths.  The featured sharp image of M77 was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The image shows details of the spiral's winding spiral arms as traced by obscuring red dust clouds and blue star clusters, all circling the galaxy's bright white luminous center.   Free APOD Lecture in Phoenix: Wednesday, December 10 at 7 pm
Visualization: Near a Black Hole and Disk (2025-12-03)

What would it look like to plunge into a monster black hole?  This image from a supercomputer visualization shows the entire sky as seen from a simulated camera plunging toward a 4-million-solar-mass black hole, similar to the one at the center of our galaxy.  The camera lies about 16 million kilometers from the black hole’s event horizon and is moving inward at 62% the speed of light.  Thanks to gravity’s funhouse effects, the starry band of the Milky Way appears both as a compact loop at the top of this view and as a secondary image stretching across the bottom.  Move the cursor over the image for additional explanations.  Visualizations like this allow astronomers to explore black holes in ways not otherwise possible.
Galaxies in the Furnace (2025-12-04)

An example of violence on a cosmic scale, enormous elliptical galaxy NGC 1316 lies about 75 million light-years away toward Fornax, the southern constellation of the Furnace. Investigating the startling sight, astronomers suspect the giant galaxy of colliding with smaller neighbor NGC 1317 seen just right of the large galaxy's center, producing far flung star streams in loops and shells. Light from their close encounter would have reached Earth some 100 million years ago. In the sharp telescopic image, the central regions of NGC 1316 and NGC 1317 appear separated by over 100,000 light-years. Complex dust lanes visible within also indicate that NGC 1316 is itself the result of a merger of galaxies in the distant past. Found on the outskirts of the Fornax galaxy cluster, NGC 1316 is known as Fornax A. One of the visually brightest of the Fornax cluster galaxies it is one of the strongest and largest celestial radio sources with radio emission extending well beyond this one degree wide field-of-view.

Image credit: Simone Curzi
The Bipolar Jets of KX Andromedae (2025-12-05)

Blasting outward from variable star KX Andromedae, these stunning bipolar jets are 19 light-years long. Recently discovered, they are revealed in unprecedented detail in this deep telescopic image centered on KX And and composed from over 692 hours of combined image data. In fact, KX And is spectroscopically found to be an interacting binary star system consisting of a bright, hot B-type star with a swollen cool giant star as its co-orbiting, close companion. The stellar material from the cool giant star is likely being transferred to the hot B-type star through an accretion disk, with spectacular symmetric jets driven outward perpendicular to the disk itself. The known distance to KX And of 2,500 light-years, angular size of the jets, and estimated inclination of the accretion disk lead to the size estimate for each jet of an astonishing 19 light-years.   Free APOD Lecture in Phoenix: Wednesday, December 10 at 7 pm

Image credit: Tim Schaeffer
Apollo 17 at Shorty Crater (2025-12-06)

Fifty three years ago, in December of 1972, Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent about 75 hours on the Moon exploring the Taurus-Littrow valley, while colleague Ronald Evans orbited overhead. This snapshot from another world was taken by Cernan as he and Schmitt roamed the lunar valley's floor. The image shows Schmitt next to the lunar rover parked along the south rim of Shorty Crater.  That location is near the spot where geologist Schmitt discovered orange lunar soil. The Apollo 17 crew returned with 110 kilograms of rock and soil samples, more than was returned from any of the other lunar landing sites. And for now, Cernan and Schmitt are the last to walk on the Moon.
The Sun and Its Missing Colors (2025-12-07)

It is still not known why the Sun's light is missing some colors.  Here are all the visible colors of the Sun, produced by passing the Sun's light through a prism-like device.  The spectrum was created at the McMath-Pierce Solar Observatory and shows, first off, that although our white-appearing Sun emits light of nearly every color, it appears brightest in yellow-green light.  The dark patches in the featured spectrum arise from gas at or above the Sun's surface absorbing sunlight emitted below.  Since different types of gas absorb different colors of light, it is possible to determine what gasses compose the Sun.  Helium, for example, was first discovered in 1868 on a solar spectrum and only later found here on Earth.  Today, the majority of spectral absorption lines have been identified - but not all.   Free APOD Lecture in Phoenix: Wednesday, December 10 at 7 pm