NASA Image of the day

• Summer Begins in Northern Hemisphere

  This full-disk image from NOAA’s GOES-13 satellite shows the Americas at the start of astronomical summer in the Northern Hemisphere on June 21, 2012.

• NASA’s Human Exploration Rover Challenge

  More than 500 students with 75 teams from around the world participated in the 31st year of NASA’s Human Exploration Rover Challenge (HERC) on April 11 and April 12, 2025, near NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Participating teams represented 35 colleges and universities, 38 high schools, and two middle schools from 20 states, Puerto Rico, and 16 other nations.

• Training for the Moo(n)

  A curious cow watches as NASA astronauts Andre Douglas and Kate Rubins perform a simulated moonwalk in the San Francisco Volcanic Field in Northern Arizona on May 14, 2024.

• Hubble Studies a Spiral’s Supernova Scene

  This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the barred spiral galaxy IC 758.

• “Cosmic Dawn” Screening at Greenbelt Cinema

  Attendees line up to enter the theater for a screening of the new NASA+ documentary “Cosmic Dawn: The Untold Story of the James Webb Space Telescope,” Wednesday, June 11, 2025, at the Greenbelt Cinema in Greenbelt, Maryland. Featuring never-before-seen footage, Cosmic Dawn offers an unprecedented glimpse into the assembly, testing, and launch of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

• Far Out

  The star cluster Pismis 24 lies within the much larger emission nebula called NGC 6357, located about 8,000 light-years from Earth. The gas below the stars glows through ionization caused by intense ultraviolet radiation from the massive young stars within the cluster.

• Portrait of a Bobcat

  At NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a bobcat wades through one of the waterways near Launch Pad 39B.

• High Above the World

  Astronaut Franklin R. Chang-Diaz works with a grapple fixture during a June 2002 spacewalk – the first spacewalk of the STS-111 mission.

• Central Brazil Cerrado

  Amid a patchwork of fields, towns, and winding rivers and roads in central Brazil stands a monolithic oval-shaped plateau. This conspicuous feature, the Serra de Caldas (also known as the Caldas Novas dome and Caldas Ridge), is perched about 300 meters (1,000 feet) above the surrounding landscape in the state of Goiás.

• Webb Sees Sombrero Galaxy in Near-Infrared

  NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently imaged the Sombrero Galaxy with its NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), which shows dust from the galaxy’s outer ring blocking stellar light from stars within the galaxy. In the central region of the galaxy, the roughly 2,000 globular clusters, or collections of hundreds of thousands of old stars held together by gravity, glow in the near-infrared. The Sombrero Galaxy is around 30 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. From Earth, we see this galaxy nearly “edge-on,” or from the side.

• Hubble Captures Cotton Candy Clouds

  This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a cloudscape in the Large Magellanic Cloud., a dwarf satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.

• America’s First Spacewalk

  Astronaut Edward H. White II, pilot of the Gemini IV four-day Earth-orbital mission, floats in the zero gravity of space outside the Gemini IV spacecraft.

• A Star Like No Other

  Scientists have discovered a star behaving like no other seen before, giving fresh clues about the origin of a new class of mysterious objects.

• NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 Launch Fifth Anniversary

  President Donald Trump steps onstage to speak following the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company's Crew Dragon spacecraft on NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 mission with NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley aboard, Saturday, May 30, 2020, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

• 45 Years Ago: NASA Announces Ninth Astronaut Group

  Sixteen of 19 astronaut candidates named on May 29, 1980, and two European trainees as payload specialists pose for photographers in the briefing room in the public affairs facility at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

• Hubble Images Galaxies Near and Far

  This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the remote galaxy HerS 020941.1+001557, which appears as a red arc that partially encircles a foreground elliptical galaxy.

• Moon and Flag at NASA Michoud

  The waning gibbous moon sets behind a flag at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans just after sunrise on Wednesday, March 19, 2025.

• Preflight Flower

  A flower is seen in the foreground with a Soyuz rocket on the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April 7, 2025. Expedition 73 crewmembers including NASA astronaut Jonny Kim launched aboard their Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft on April 8.

• Another Milestone for X-59

  NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft is seen during its “aluminum bird” systems testing at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California. The test verified how the aircraft’s hardware and software work together, responding to pilot inputs and handling injected system failures.

• Sunset on Mars

  On May 19th, 2005, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view as the Sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars. This panoramic camera mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of the rover's 489th Martian day, or sol.

• Webb Finds Icy Disk

  Webb has found crystalline water ice in a debris disk around a young, Sun-like star called HD 181327. Based on its presence in our own solar system, scientists have expected to see it in other star systems — but haven't had sensitive enough instruments to provide definitive proof until now.

• Nancy Grace Roman’s 100th Birthday

  Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first Chief of Astronomy, briefs Astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin on celestial objects in 1965 in Washington, D.C.

• Deimos Before Dawn

  NASA's Perseverance rover captured this view of Deimos, the smaller of Mars' two moons, shining in the sky at 4:27 a.m. local time on March 1, 2025, the 1,433rd Martian day, or sol, of the mission.

• Pretty in Pink

  The perfectly picturesque spiral galaxy known as Messier 81, or M81, looks sharp in this composite from NASA's Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes and NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer.

• Lightning in Southeast Asia

  Astronaut Don Pettit took this nighttime photo while the International Space Station orbited near the Andaman Sea in Southeast Asia.

• Jupiter’s Turbulent Atmosphere

  JunoCam, the visible light imager aboard NASA's Juno, captured this view of Jupiter's northern high latitudes during the spacecraft's 69th flyby of the giant planet on Jan. 28, 2025. Jupiter's belts and zones stand out in this enhanced color rendition, along with the turbulence along their edges caused by winds going in different directions.

• 25 Years of NASA Student Launch

  Students from the University of Massachusetts Amherst team carry their high-powered rocket toward the launch pad at NASA’s 2025 Student Launch launch day competition in Toney, Alabama, on April 4, 2025.

• NASA Astronaut Anne McClain Works on Space Station

  NASA astronaut and Expedition 72 flight engineer Anne McClain is pictured near one of the International Space Station's main solar arrays during a spacewalk to upgrade the orbital outpost's power generation system and relocate a communications antenna.

• A Glimpse of a Meatball

  The NASA "meatball" logo mounted on the south side of the Flight Research Building at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, as seen through foliage.

• SPHEREx Starts Scanning Entire Sky

  NASA's SPHEREx mission is observing the entire sky in 102 infrared colors, or wavelengths of light not visible to the human eye. This image shows a section of sky in one wavelength (3.29 microns), revealing a cloud of dust made of a molecule similar to soot or smoke.