omnianasa/nasa-apod-metadata huggingface dataset:
NGC 247 and Friends (2018-03-30)
About 70,000 light-years across, NGC 247 is a spiral galaxy smaller than our Milky Way. Measured to be only 11 million light-years distant it is nearby though. Tilted nearly edge-on as seen from our perspective, it dominates this telescopic field of view toward the southern constellation Cetus. The pronounced void on one side of the galaxy's disk recalls for some its popular name, the Needle's Eye galaxy. Many background galaxies are visible in this sharp galaxy portrait, including the remarkable string of four galaxies just below and left of NGC 247 known as Burbidge's Chain. Burbidge's Chain galaxies are about 300 million light-years distant. The deep image even reveals that the two leftmost galaxies in the chain are apparently interacting, joined by a faint bridge of material. NGC 247 itself is part of the Sculptor Group of galaxies along with the shiny spiral NGC 253.
Twilight in a Western Sky (2018-03-31)
A slender crescent Moon and inner planets Venus and Mercury never wander far from the Sun in planet Earth's skies. In the fading evening twilight of March 18, they line up near the western horizon in this atmospheric skyscape. While the celestial scene was enjoyed around the world, this photo captures the trio, with fainter Mercury at the far right, above the crags of Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas. Tonight the Moon will be full though, and rise opposite the Sun. Look for it high in the sky at midnight, near bright star Spica.
I Brought You the Moon (2018-04-01)
I love you so much that I brought you the Moon.  Please take it before this tree becomes more interested.  Also, the Moon is heavier than I thought.  And I foolishly picked it up by the hot side by mistake.  But it is for you and, well, the others reading this APOD.  Promise to keep this image -- our image -- in a safe place, and know that it was taken in a single, well-planned exposure in Valladolid, Spain.  Please take it and keep it always as a token of our love and, well, April Fool's Day.   Retrospective: April Fool's Day APODs
Moons, Rings, Shadows, Clouds: Saturn (Cassini) (2018-04-02)
While cruising around Saturn, be on the lookout for picturesque juxtapositions of moons, rings, and shadows. One quite picturesque arrangement occurred in 2005 and was captured by the then Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft. In the featured image, moons Tethys and Mimas are visible on either side of Saturn's thin rings, which are seen nearly edge-on.  Across the top of Saturn are dark shadows of the wide rings, exhibiting their impressive complexity. The violet-light image brings up the texture of the backdrop: Saturn's clouds. Cassini orbited Saturn from 2004 until September of last year, when the robotic spacecraft was directed to dive into Saturn to keep it from contaminating any moons.
The Milky Way over the Seven Strong Men Rock Formations (2018-04-03)
You may have heard of the Seven Sisters in the sky, but have you heard about the Seven Strong Men on the ground? Located just west of the Ural Mountains, the unusual Manpupuner rock formations are one of the Seven Wonders of Russia. How these ancient 40-meter high pillars formed is yet unknown.  The persistent photographer of this featured image battled rough terrain and uncooperative weather to capture these rugged stone towers in winter at night, being finally successful in February of 2014.  Utilizing the camera's time delay feature, the photographer holds a flashlight in the foreground near one of the snow-covered pillars.  High above, millions of stars shine down, while the band of our Milky Way Galaxy crosses diagonally down from the upper left.
Intrepid Crater on Mars from Opportunity (2018-04-04)
The robotic rover Opportunity sometimes passes small craters on Mars. Pictured here in 2010 is Intrepid Crater, a 20-meter across impact basin  slightly larger than Nereus Crater that Opportunity had chanced across previously. The featured image is in approximately true color but horizontally compressed to accommodate a wide angle panorama.  Intrepid Crater was named after the lunar module Intrepid that carried Apollo 12 astronauts to Earth's Moon 49 years ago. Beyond Intrepid Crater and past long patches of rusty Martian desert lie peaks from the rim of large Endeavour Crater, visible on the horizon.  The Opportunity rover continues to explore Mars, recently surpassing 5,000 Martian days on the red planet.
NGC 289: Swirl in the Southern Sky (2018-04-05)
About 70 million light-years distant, gorgeous spiral galaxy NGC 289 is larger than our own Milky Way. Seen nearly face-on, its bright core and colorful central disk give way to remarkably faint, bluish spiral arms. The extensive arms sweep well over 100 thousand light-years from the galaxy's center. At the lower right in this sharp, telescopic galaxy portrait the main spiral arm seems to encounter a small, fuzzy elliptical companion galaxy interacting with enormous NGC 289. Of course the spiky stars are in the foreground of the scene. They lie within the Milky Way toward the southern constellation Sculptor.
NGC 3324 in Carina (2018-04-06)
This bright cosmic cloud was sculpted by stellar winds and radiation from the hot young stars of open cluster NGC 3324. With dust clouds in silhouette against its glowing atomic gas, the pocket-shaped star-forming region actually spans about 35 light-years. It lies some 7,500 light-years away toward the nebula rich southern constellation Carina. A composite of narrowband image data, the telescopic view captures the characteristic emission from ionized sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms mapped to red, green, and blue hues in the popular Hubble Palette. For some, the celestial landscape of bright ridges of emission bordered by cool, obscuring dust along the right side create a recognizable face in profile. The region's popular name is the Gabriela Mistral Nebula for the Nobel Prize winning Chilean poet.
Painting with Jupiter (2018-04-07)
Brush strokes of Jupiter's signature atmospheric bands and vortices form this planetary post-impressionist work of art. The creative image uses actual data from the Juno spacecraft's JunoCam. To paint on the digital canvas, an image with light and dark tones was chosen for processing and an oil-painting software filter applied. The image data was captured during perijove 10, Juno's December 16, 2017 close encounter with the solar system's ruling gas giant. At the time the spacecraft was cruising about 13,000 kilometers above northern Jovian cloud tops.
NGC 6960: The Witch's Broom Nebula (2018-04-08)
Ten thousand years ago, before the dawn of recorded human history, a new light would have suddenly have appeared in the night sky and faded after a few weeks.  Today we know this light was from a supernova, or exploding star, and record the expanding debris cloud as the Veil Nebula, a supernova remnant.  This sharp telescopic view is centered on a western segment of the Veil Nebula cataloged as NGC 6960 but less formally known as the Witch's Broom Nebula.  Blasted out in the cataclysmic explosion, the interstellar shock wave plows through space sweeping up and exciting interstellar material. Imaged with narrow band filters, the glowing filaments are like long ripples in a sheet seen almost edge on, remarkably well separated into atomic hydrogen (red) and oxygen (blue-green) gas. The complete supernova remnant lies about 1400 light-years away towards the constellation Cygnus. This Witch's Broom actually spans about 35 light-years. The bright star in the frame is 52 Cygni, visible with the unaided eye from a dark location but unrelated to the ancient supernova remnant.
Dragon Aurora over Norway (2018-04-10)
What's that in the sky? An aurora. A large coronal hole opened last month, a few days before this image was taken, throwing a cloud of fast moving electrons, protons, and ions toward the Earth. Some of this cloud impacted our Earth's magnetosphere and resulted in spectacular auroras being seen at high northern latitudes. Featured here is a particularly photogenic auroral curtain captured above Troms� Norway. To the astrophotographer, this shimmering green glow of recombining atmospheric oxygen appeared as a large dragon, but feel free to share what it looks like to you.  Although now past Solar Maximum, our Sun continues to show occasional activity creating impressive auroras on Earth visible even last week.
Fortuitous Flash Candidate for the Farthest Star Yet Seen (2018-04-11)
Was this flash the farthest star yet seen? An unexpected flash of light noticed fortuitously on Hubble Space Telescope images may prove to be not only an unusual gravitational lensing event but also an image of a normal star 100 times farther away than any star previously imaged individually. The featured image shows the galaxy cluster on the left complete with many yellowish galaxies, while on the right is an expanded square where a source appeared in 2016 that was not evident in 2011. The spectrum and variability of this source are strangely unlike a supernova, but rather appear more consistent with a normal blue supergiant star magnified by about a factor of 2000 by a confluence of aligned gravitational lenses.  Dubbed Icarus, the source is in a galaxy well behind the galaxy cluster and far across the universe -- at redshift 1.5.  If the lens interpretation is correct and Icarus is not an exploding star, further observations of it and other similarly magnified stars could give information about the stellar and dark matter content in the galaxy cluster and the universe.   Open Science: Browse 1,600+ codes in the Astrophysics Source Code Library
M22 and the Wanderers (2018-04-12)
Wandering through the constellation Sagittarius, bright planets Mars and Saturn appeared together in early morning skies over the last weeks. They are captured in this 3 degree wide field-of-view from March 31 in a close celestial triangle with large globular star cluster Messier 22. Of course M22 (bottom left) is about 10,000 light-years distant, a massive ball of over 100,000 stars much older than our Sun. Pale yellow and shining by reflected sunlight, Saturn (on top) is about 82 light-minutes away. Look carefully and you can spot large moon Titan as a pinpoint of light at about the 5 o'clock position in the glare of Saturn's overexposed disk. Slightly brighter and redder Mars is 9 light-minutes distant. While both planets are moving on toward upcoming oppositions, by July Mars will become much brighter still, with good telescopic views near its 2018 opposition. Then it will be a mere 3.2 light-minutes from planet Earth.
Facing NGC 3344 (2018-04-13)
From our vantage point in the Milky Way Galaxy, we see NGC 3344 face-on. Nearly 40,000 light-years across, the big, beautiful spiral galaxy is located just 20 million light-years away in the constellation of Leo Minor. This multi-color Hubble Space Telescope close-up of NGC 3344 includes remarkable details from near infrared to ultraviolet wavelengths. The frame extends some 15,000 light-years across the spiral's central regions. From the core outward, the galaxy's colors change from the yellowish light of old stars in the center to young blue star clusters and reddish star forming regions along the loose, fragmented spiral arms. Of course, the bright stars with a spiky appearance are in front of NGC 3344 and lie well within our own Milky Way.
Martian Chiaroscuro (2018-04-14)
Deep shadows create dramatic contrasts between light and dark in this high-resolution close-up of the martian surface. Recorded on January 24, 2014 by the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the scene spans about 1.5 kilometers. From 250 kilometers above the Red Planet the camera is looking down at a sand dune field in a southern highlands crater. Captured when the Sun was about 5 degrees above the local horizon, only the dune crests were caught in full sunlight. A long, cold winter is coming to the southern hemisphere and bright ridges of seasonal frost line the martian dunes.
Space Shuttle Rising (2018-04-15)
What's that rising from the clouds?  The space shuttle. Sometimes, if you look out the window of an airplane at just the right time and place, you see something unusual -- in this case a space shuttle launching to orbit.   The featured image of Endeavour's final launch in 2011 May was captured from a NASA shuttle training aircraft.  Taken well above the clouds, the image can be matched with similar images of the same shuttle plume taken below the clouds.  Hot glowing gasses expelled by the engines are visible near the rising shuttle, as well as a long smoke plume.  A shadow of the plume appears on the cloud deck, indicating the direction of the Sun. The US Space Shuttle program concluded in 2011, and Endeavour can now be visited at the California Science Center.  Planned for tomorrow, however, is a different launch -- that of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
M57: The Ring Nebula (2018-04-17)
cept for the rings of Saturn, the Ring Nebula (M57) is probably the most famous celestial band. Its classic appearance is understood to be due to our own perspective, though. The recent mapping of the expanding nebula's 3-D structure, based in part on this clear Hubble image,indicates that the nebula is a relatively dense, donut-like ring wrapped around the middle of a (American) football-shaped cloud of glowing gas. The view from planet Earth looks down the long axis of the football, face-on to the ring. Of course, in this well-studied example of a planetary nebula, the glowing material does not come from planets. Instead, the gaseous shroud represents outer layers expelled from the dying, once sun-like star, now a tiny pinprick of light seen at the nebula's center. Intense ultraviolet light from the hot central star ionizes atoms in the gas. The Ring Nebula is about one light-year across and 2,000 light-years away.   Share the Sky: NASA Open API for APOD
Milky Way over Deadvlei in Namibia (2018-04-18)
What planet is this?  It is the only planet currently known to have trees. The trees in Deadvlei, though, have been dead for over 500 years.  Located in Namib-Naukluft Park in Namibia (Earth), saplings grew after rainfall caused a local river to overflow, but died after sand dunes shifted to section off the river. High above and far in the distance, the band of our Milky Way Galaxy forms an arch over a large stalk in this well-timed composite image, taken last month. The soil of white clay appears to glow by reflected starlight. Rising on the left, under the Milky Way's arch, is a band of zodiacal light -- sunlight reflected by dust orbiting in the inner Solar System. On the right, just above one of Earth's larger sand dunes, an astute eye can find the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our galaxy. Finding the Small Magellanic Cloud in the featured image, though, is perhaps too hard.
NGC 7635: The Bubble Nebula (2018-04-19)
Blown by the wind from a massive star, this interstellar apparition has a surprisingly familiar shape. Cataloged as NGC 7635, it is also known simply as The Bubble Nebula. Although it looks delicate, the 7 light-year diameter bubble offers evidence of violent processes at work. Above and left of the Bubble's center is a hot, O-type star, several hundred thousand times more luminous and some 45 times more massive than the Sun. A fierce stellar wind and intense radiation from that star has blasted out the structure of glowing gas against denser material in a surrounding molecular cloud. The intriguing Bubble Nebula and associated cloud complex lie a mere 7,100 light-years away toward the boastful constellation Cassiopeia. This sharp, tantalizing view of the cosmic bubble is a composite of Hubble Space Telescope image data from 2016, reprocessed to present the nebula's intense narrowband emission in an approximate true color scheme.
Moon in the Hyades (2018-04-20)
Have you seen the Moon lately? On April 18, its waxing sunlit crescent moved through planet Earth's night across a background of stars in the Hyades. Anchored by bright star Aldebaran, the nearby, V-shaped star cluster and complete lunar orb appear in this telephoto image. The engaging skyview is actually digitally composed from a series of varying exposures. Recorded in 1/60th of a second, the shortest in the series captures the Moon's bright crescent in sharp detail. Longer exposures, ranging up to 15 seconds, capture fainter background stars as well as earthshine, visible to the eye as the earthlit lunar night side.
TESS Launch Close Up (2018-04-21)
NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) began its search for planets orbiting other stars by leaving planet Earth on April 18. The exoplanet hunter rode to orbit on top of a Falcon 9 rocket. The Falcon 9 is so designated for its 9 Merlin first stage engines seen in this sound-activated camera close-up from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. In the coming weeks, TESS will use a series of thruster burns to boost it into a high-Earth, highly elliptical orbit. A lunar gravity assist maneuver will allow it to reach a previously untried stable orbit with half the orbital period of the Moon and a maximum distance from Earth of about 373,000 kilometers (232,000 miles). From there, TESS will carry out a two year survey to search for planets around the brightest and closest stars in the sky.
Meteor Over Crater Lake (2018-04-22)
Did you see it?  One of the more common questions during a meteor shower occurs because the time it takes for a meteor to flash is typically less than the time it takes for a head to turn. Possibly, though, the glory of seeing bright meteors shoot across and knowing that they were once small granules on another world might make it all worthwhile, even if your observing partner(s) could not share in every particular experience. Peaking late tonight, a dark sky should enable the Lyrids meteor shower to exhibit as many as 20 visible meteors per hour from some locations. In the featured composite of nine exposures taken during the 2012 shower, a bright Lyrid meteor streaks above picturesque Crater Lake in Oregon, USA.  Snow covers the foreground, while the majestic central band of our home galaxy arches well behind the serene lake. Other meteor showers this year -- and every year -- include the Perseids in mid-August and the Leonids in mid-November.
The Blue Horsehead Nebula in Infrared (2018-04-23)
The Blue Horsehead Nebula looks quite different in infrared light.  In visible light, the reflecting dust of the nebula appears blue and shaped like a horse's head. In infrared light, however, a complex labyrinth of filaments, caverns, and cocoons of glowing dust and gas emerges, making it hard to even identify the equine icon.  The featured image of the nebula was created in three infrared colors (R=22, G=12, B=4.6 microns) from data taken by NASA's orbiting Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft. The nebula is cataloged as IC 4592 and spans about 40 light years, lying about 400 light years away toward the constellation Scorpius along the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. IC 4592 is fainter but covers an angularly greater region than the better known Horsehead Nebula of Orion. The star that predominantly illuminates and heats the dust is  Nu Scorpii, visible as the reddened star left of center.
Hubble's Jupiter and the Shrinking Great Red Spot (2018-04-25)
What will become of Jupiter's Great Red Spot?  Gas giant Jupiter is the solar system's largest world with about 320 times the mass of planet Earth. Jupiter is home to one of the largest and longest lasting storm systems known, the Great Red Spot (GRS), visible to the left. The GRS is so large it could swallow Earth, although it has been shrinking.  Comparison with historical notes indicate that the storm spans only about one third of the surface area it had 150 years ago. NASA's Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program has been monitoring the storm more recently using the Hubble Space Telescope. The featured Hubble OPAL image shows Jupiter as it appeared in 2016, processed in a way that makes red hues appear quite vibrant. Modern GRS data indicate that the storm continues to constrict its surface area, but is also becoming slightly taller, vertically.  No one knows the future of the GRS, including the possibility that if the shrinking trend continues, the GRS might one day even do what smaller spots on Jupiter have done -- disappear completely.
The Snows of Churyumov-Gerasimenko (2018-04-26)
You couldn't really be caught in this blizzard while standing by a cliff on Churyumov-Gerasimenko, also known as comet 67P. Orbiting the comet in June of 2016 the Rosetta spacecraft's narrow angle camera did record streaks of dust and ice particles though, as they drifted across the field of view near the camera and above the comet's surface. Some of the bright specks in the scene are likely due to a rain of energetic charged particles or cosmic rays hitting the camera, and the dense background of stars in the direction of the constellation Canis Major. Click on this single frame to play and the background stars are easy to spot trailing from top to bottom in an animated gif (7.7MB). The 33 frames of the time compressed animation span about 25 minutes of real time. The stunning gif was constructed from consecutive images taken while Rosetta cruised some 13 kilometers from the comet's nucleus.
Gaia's Milky Way (2018-04-27)
This grand allsky view of our Milky Way and nearby galaxies is not a photograph. It's a map based on individual measurements for nearly 1.7 billion stars. The astronomically rich data set used to create it, the sky-scanning Gaia satellite's second data release, includes remarkably precise determinations of position, brightness, colour, and parallax distance for 1.3 billion stars. Of course, that's about 1 percent of the total number of stars in the Milky Way. The flat plane of our galaxy still dominates the view. Home to most Milky Way stars it stretches across the center of Gaia's stellar data map. Voids and rifts along the galactic plane correspond to starlight-obscuring interstellar dust clouds. At lower right are stars of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, neighboring galaxies that lie just beyond the Milky Way.
Magellanic Mountain (2018-04-28)
Flanked by satellite galaxies of the Milky Way a volcanic peak rises from this rugged horizon. The southern night skyscape looks toward the south over Laguna Lejia and the altiplano of the Antofagasta Region of northern Chile. Extending the view across extragalactic space, the Large (right) and Small Magellanic Clouds are so named for the 16th century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, leader of planet Earth's first circumnavigation. The larger cloud lies some 180,000 light-years, and the smaller 210,000 light-years beyond the mountaintop. Left of the Small Cloud of Magellan and also reflected in the foreground watery shallows on that starry night, 47 Tucanae shines like a bright star. A globular star cluster that roams the halo of the Milky Way, 47 Tucanae is about 13,000 light-years away.
Total Solar Eclipse Corona in HDR (2018-04-30)
How great was the Great American Eclipse? The featured HDR image shows it to be perhaps greater than we knew. On August 21 of last year, the Moon blocked the Sun for a few minutes along a narrow path across the USA. Although one of the most photographed events in human history, this image -- only recently completed after an extraordinary amount of digital processing -- shows one of the most detailed depictions of a solar corona ever taken.  Composed of extremely hot gas, the solar corona is only visible to the unaided eye during a total solar eclipse. The featured image combined over 70 images of different time exposures.  The series of complementary HDR images recovered enough detail to see motion of the solar corona. The images were taken in Unity, Oregon in the morning to get steady atmospheric seeing conditions. The next total solar eclipse visible on Earth will be in 2019 July, while the next one visible across North America and the USA will occur in 2024 April.