NASA Image of the day

The latest NASA "Image of the Day" image.

  • Weekends on the Space Station

    Weekends on the International Space Station are for housecleaning and haircuts. NASA astronaut Jessica Meir trims the hair of fellow NASA astronaut Jack Hathaway, both Expedition 74 flight engineers, using an electric razor attached to a vacuum that collects loose clippings to keep the station’s atmosphere clean in microgravity.

  • Total Lunar Eclipse

    A total lunar eclipse rises over New Orleans, home of NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility, in the early morning hours of Tuesday, March 3. A lunar eclipse occurs when Earth passes directly between the Sun and Moon, casting a huge shadow across the Moon’s surface. The Moon appears dark red or orange as the Sun’s light filters through Earth’s atmosphere.

  • Blowing Stellar Bubbles

    For the first time, a much younger version of the Sun has been caught red-handed blowing bubbles in the galaxy, by astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

  • Artemis II Recovery Training

    Off the coast of California, NASA’s Artemis Landing and Recovery team and the Department of War that will work together to retrieve the Artemis II crew and Orion spacecraft following their return to Earth and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean are performing a final simulation of their activities, called a just-in-time training, at sea on Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. During the training, teams use the Crew Module Test Article, a full-scale mockup of the Orion spacecraft, to simulate as close as possible the conditions they can expect to encounter during splashdown of the Artemis II mission.

  • Sunglint on Atlantic Ocean

    The sun's glint beams off a partly cloudy Atlantic Ocean just after sunrise as the International Space Station orbited 263 miles above.

  • Harnessing the Sun to Extract Oxygen on the Moon

    The Carbothermal Reduction Demonstration (CaRD) project aims to demonstrate the carbothermal reduction of lunar regolith to produce oxygen on the Moon's South Pole. For this test, the team integrated the solar concentrator, mirrors, and software and confirmed the production of carbon monoxide.

  • Inside Project Hail Mary

    NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren takes a selfie with the people behind "Project Hail Mary" and the audience during a panel about the movie at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Feb. 25, 2026.

  • Making an Entrance

    NASA astronaut and SpaceX Crew-12 Pilot Jack Hathaway enters the International Space Station after docking aboard the Dragon spacecraft to join Expedition 74 and begin a long-duration microgravity research mission.

  • Webb Maps Uranus’ Upper Atmosphere

    For the first time, an international team of astronomers have mapped the vertical structure of Uranus’s upper atmosphere, uncovering how temperature and charged particles vary with height across the planet.

  • Perseverance’s Landing

    This high-resolution still image is part of a video taken by several cameras as NASA's Perseverance rover touched down on Mars on February 18, 2021.

  • Artemis II Crew Trains on T-38

    NASA astronaut Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen take off on a T-38 training flight from Ellington Field on Feb. 11, 2026, as a waning crescent Moon hovers above.

  • Crystals Grown in Space

    This image of lysozyme crystals grown aboard the International Space Station was taken after the crystals returned to Earth in April 2024. Lysozyme is a protein found in bodily fluids like tears, saliva, and milk. It is used as a control compound to demonstrate well-formed crystals.

  • Fishing Boats and City Lights

    Fishing boats illuminate the Arabian Sea along India’s west coast with green lights designed to attract squid, shrimp, sardines, and mackerel in this nighttime photograph from the International Space Station, orbiting 259 miles above Earth. At lower right, the city lights of Hyderabad—renowned for its historic diamond and pearl trade—stretch westward toward the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, home to over 26 million people and the heart of Bollywood.

  • Stormy, Snowy Winter for Hokkaido

    Northern Japan, especially the island of Hokkaido, is home to some of the snowiest cities in the world. Sapporo, the island's largest city and host of an annual snow festival, typically sees more than 140 days of snowfall, with nearly 6 meters (20 feet) accumulating on average each year.

  • NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 Launch

    A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company's Dragon spacecraft is launched on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission to the International Space Station with NASA astronauts Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev onboard, Friday, Feb. 13, 2026, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission is the twelfth crew rotation mission of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program. Meir, Hathaway, Adenot, and Fedyaev launched at 5:15 a.m. EST from Space Launch Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to begin a mission aboard the orbital outpost.

  • Shimmering Light in Egg Nebula

    NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reveals the clearest view yet of the Egg Nebula. This structure of gas and dust was created by a dying, Sun-like star. These newest observations were taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3.

  • Crew-12 Members and Insignia

    From left, NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 crew members – Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, NASA astronauts Jack Hathaway and Jessica Meir, and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot – pose next to their mission insignia inside the Astronaut Crew Quarters in the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday, Feb. 9, 2026.

  • CubeSats’ Missions Begin

    A pair of CubeSats designed by college students from around the world is deployed into Earth orbit from a small satellite orbital deployer on the outside of the International Space Station's Kibo laboratory module. Students from Mexico, Italy, Thailand, Malaysia, and Japan designed the shoe-boxed sized satellites for a series of Earth observations and technology demonstrations.

  • Icy Hudson River

    The New York metropolitan area was showing the effects of a prolonged cold spell in late January 2026. During a stretch of frigid weather, ice choked the Hudson River along Manhattan’s western shore.

  • Strong Solar Flare

    NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this image of a solar flare — seen as the bright flash toward the upper middle — on Feb. 4, 2026. The image shows a subset of extreme ultraviolet light that highlights the extremely hot material in flares and which is colorized in blue and red.

  • Hubble Spots Lens-Shaped Galaxy

    This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 7722, a lenticular galaxy located about 187 million light-years away, features concentric rings of dust and gas that appear to swirl around its bright nucleus.

  • NASA Heat Shield Tech Contributes to America’s Space Industry

    The Varda Space Industries W-5 capsule returned to Earth in Koonibba in South Australia on Jan. 29, 2026, with the protection of a heat shield made of C-PICA, a cutting-edge material licensed from NASA and manufactured by Varda. The capsule’s successful return marks the first time a capsule protected entirely by Varda-made C-PICA has come back to Earth.

  • Full Moon over Artemis II

    A full moon is seen shining over NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) and Orion spacecraft, atop the mobile launcher in the early hours of February 1, 2026.

  • NASA's Orion Spacecraft at Launch Pad

    NASA's Orion spacecraft sits atop the agency's SLS (Space Launch System) rocket at the launch pad after rollout on Jan. 17, 2026.

  • Goldstone’s DSS-15 Antenna and the Milky Way

    Deep Space Station 15 (DSS-15), one of the 112-foot (34-meter) antennas at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex near Barstow, California, looks skyward, with the stars of the Milky Way overhead, in September 2025.

  • Webb Zooms into Helix Nebula

    A new image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope of a portion of the Helix Nebula highlights comet-like knots, fierce stellar winds, and layers of gas shed off by a dying star interacting with its surrounding environment. Webb’s image also shows the stark transition between the hottest gas to the coolest gas as the shell expands out from the central white dwarf.

  • Chandra, Webb Catch Twinkling Lights

    This stellar landscape is reminiscent of a winter vista in a view from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (red, green, and blue). Chandra data (red, green and blue) punctuate the scene with bursts of colored lights representing high-energy activity from the active stars.

  • NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Finds Crystal-Spewing Protostar

    NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s 2024 NIRCam image shows protostar EC 53 circled. Researchers using new data from Webb’s MIRI proved that crystalline silicates form in the hottest part of the disk of gas and dust surrounding the star — and may be shot to the system’s edges.

  • Hubble Observes Ghostly Cloud Alive with Star Formation

    A seemingly serene landscape of gas and dust is hopping with star formation behind the scenes.

  • Red, Green Light Show

    A green and red aurora streams across Earth’s horizon above the city lights of Europe in this Jan. 19, 2026, photograph, which looks north across Italy toward Germany. The International Space Station was orbiting 262 miles above the Mediterranean Sea at approximately 10:02 p.m. local time when the image was captured.