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Image of the Day

Weekends on the International Space Station are for housecleaning and haircuts. NASA astronaut Jessica Meir trims the hair of fellow...
Jessica Meir holds an electric razor with a vacuum to Jack Hathaway's hair. She looks down at what she's doing, while Hathaway faces to the right of the image. Meir's brown curly hair floats up above her head.
A total lunar eclipse rises over New Orleans, home of NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility, in the early morning hours of...
A mostly red full Moon against the black background of the night sky.
For the first time, a much younger version of the Sun has been caught red-handed blowing bubbles in the galaxy,...
A star seen in infrared and X-ray light. There is a hazy purple bubble that reaches upward and below that, dust wings that look like a moth’s wings.
Off the coast of California, NASA’s Artemis Landing and Recovery team and the Department of War that will work together...
Two boats with two crews of people are near a full-scale mockup Orion spacecraft in the water. Each of the boats churns up white water behind them. The spacecraft is black and has five orange balloon-like structures on top of it.
The sun's glint beams off a partly cloudy Atlantic Ocean just after sunrise as the International Space Station orbited 263...
A view of the Atlantic Ocean from the International Space Station. Sun shines on the water, turning the water in the middle of the photo yellow-orange. There are flat, white clouds scattered above the ocean. In the distance, Earth’s gentle curve is outlined by a pale blue hazy line – that’s our atmosphere. Beyond that is the darkness of space.
The Carbothermal Reduction Demonstration (CaRD) project aims to demonstrate the carbothermal reduction of lunar regolith to produce oxygen on the...
Light shines onto a mirror-like solar concentrator resting on a workbench. The concentrator is tilted upward around 45 degrees to catch the light. Its surface is black at the edges, and as you move inward, it goes from a deep blue to white.
NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren takes a selfie with the people behind "Project Hail Mary" and the audience during a panel...
At right, a man in a blue flight suit with patches on it takes a selfie with his cell phone. He is in the photo, as well as panel members and the large audience. They are in an auditorium. In the far background, there is a NASA "meatball" insignia and the letters "JPL" on the wall.
NASA astronaut and SpaceX Crew-12 Pilot Jack Hathaway enters the International Space Station after docking aboard the Dragon spacecraft to...
A man with dark hair and a mustache looks up at the camera, smiling. His hands are on the bottom edge of the hatch entrance as he makes his way inside the space station. The path he is coming through has many square cargo bags strapped to each side.
For the first time, an international team of astronomers have mapped the vertical structure of Uranus’s upper atmosphere, uncovering how...
This image shows the planet Uranus set against the blackness of space. The planet appears as a smooth, bright cyan disc at the center, its atmosphere reveals soft, hazy tones of blue. Surrounding the planet is a vivid reddish glow, forming a diffuse halo that contrasts strongly with the cool blue of the planetary disc. Encircling Uranus are several thin, concentric rings, visible as pale gray arcs. Subtle variations in brightness can be seen across the planet’s face, with slightly brighter patches near the limb, hinting at atmospheric structure.
This high-resolution still image is part of a video taken by several cameras as NASA's Perseverance rover touched down on...
A rover descends toward Mars. The view is top-down. The rover looks like a white rectangle with 6 small black wheels attached to it. Mars' terrain is a brown blur.
NASA astronaut Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen take off on a T-38 training flight from Ellington...
A white plane rises upward to the left against a blue sky. At top left, the waning crescent moon is faintly visible. The plane has a blue stripe low on its body and a version of the NASA insignia on the rudder.
This image of lysozyme crystals grown aboard the International Space Station was taken after the crystals returned to Earth in...
An extreme close-up on crystals. They are geometric in shape, some looking like squares while others are hexagons. Orange light shines from behind the crystals. The light shines through the crystals that face us and highlights their edges.
Fishing boats illuminate the Arabian Sea along India’s west coast with green lights designed to attract squid, shrimp, sardines, and...
City lights sparkle over the land at middle and bottom right. Green lights line the water by the shore.
Northern Japan, especially the island of Hokkaido, is home to some of the snowiest cities in the world. Sapporo, the...
A satellite image shows snow blanketing Hokkaido, Japan, with sea ice swirling just north of the island.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company's Dragon spacecraft is launched on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission to the International...
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.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reveals the clearest view yet of the Egg Nebula. This structure of gas and dust was...
In the image center, an opaque oval cloud of gray gas aligned from 1 o’clock to 7 o’clock hides a star. Two strong beams of light from the star emerge from large holes in both sides of the cloud, forming narrow cones extending toward 10 o’clock and 4 o’clock. The central cloud is surrounded by concentric, wispy shells of gas illuminated by the star’s light. The shells reflect extra light where they’re hit by the twin beams. A crowd of smaller stars with cross-shaped spikes over them surrounds the nebula on a black background.
From left, NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 crew members – Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, NASA astronauts Jack Hathaway and Jessica Meir, and...
Four people - two men on the left and two women on the right - pose with the Crew-12 mission insignia. They are all wearing blue jumpsuits with various patches on them. The insignia is on the wall, framed in a black recess. Autographed patches are stuck on the wall around the black frame.
A pair of CubeSats designed by college students from around the world is deployed into Earth orbit from a small...
Two CubeSats, one silver and one with a red face, are ejected from the International Space Station (bottom left) into the blackness of space.
The New York metropolitan area was showing the effects of a prolonged cold spell in late January 2026. During a...
Chunks of ice, which appear light blue in this false-color image, line the western shore of Manhattan in the Hudson River. Smaller rivers and lakes in the scene also appear frozen or partially frozen. The ground is snow-covered, and tall buildings cast long, dark shadows.
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this image of a solar flare — seen as the bright flash toward the upper...
The Sun is blue, purple, and black with a bright purple line surrounding it. Scattered across it are some brighter purple spots where there is higher activity. Just above center is a bright red and white X: This is the solar flare.
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 7722, a lenticular galaxy located about 187 million light-years away, features concentric...
A disk-shaped galaxy. It glows brightly at the center and shines a faint white light all around it. The disk is made up of tightly-packed rings of dust, some darker and some lighter. Wide, long lanes of dark reddish dust cross the galaxy in front of its edge, blocking out some of its light; the long strands twist and break apart at each side. A couple of nearby stars and distant galaxies are also visible on the black background.
The Varda Space Industries W-5 capsule returned to Earth in Koonibba in South Australia on Jan. 29, 2026, with the...
An orange and white streak cuts diagonally through a cloudy sky and down to Earth in the distance. The clouds have an unusual, rippling, wave-like pattern.
A full moon is seen shining over NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) and Orion spacecraft, atop the mobile launcher in...
A golden 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. The SLS core stage is a distinctive deep orange, while Orion is white and sits on top of the core stage.
NASA's Orion spacecraft sits atop the agency's SLS (Space Launch System) rocket at the launch pad after rollout on Jan....
The Orion spacecraft is white and cylinder-shaped with a pointed nose at the top. It rests above the SLS rocket, part of which (the orange part) can just barely be seen at the bottom of the photo. Behind Orion and the SLS is a gray gantry with scaffolding and balconies.
Deep Space Station 15 (DSS-15), one of the 112-foot (34-meter) antennas at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex near Barstow,...
A white radio antenna faces upward in the direction of a star-studded night sky.
A new image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope of a portion of the Helix Nebula highlights comet-like knots, fierce...
A closeup of a small section of the Helix Nebula, an expanding shell of gas and dust. Thousands of orange and gold comet-like pillars stream upward from the bottom, like thin liquid blown up a sheet of glass. These pillars are around the circumference of the arced shell, which forms a partial orange semi-circle at the bottom. The pillars are more numerous and denser at the bottom, and darker red. They fade to orange and then yellow in the arc. In the top two-thirds, they are thinner and more golden, and it’s easier to see the black background of space. Several bright blue stars, some with diffraction spikes, are scattered throughout. A few larger stars are on the right side.
This stellar landscape is reminiscent of a winter vista in a view from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (red, green,...
A winter scene fit for a holiday greeting card. Above what appears to be a fantastical snowy mountainscape, is a brilliant blue sky packed with colorful lights. The golden mountainscape is in fact part of the nebula NGC 6357, as captured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. The green, red, and golden lights in the blue sky above are bursts of high-energy X-rays from active stars, detected by Chandra.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s 2024 NIRCam image shows protostar EC 53 circled. Researchers using new data from Webb’s MIRI...
A rectangular image of the Serpens Nebula with black vertical rectangles at the bottom left and top right to indicate missing data. A young star-forming region is filled with wispy orange, red, and blue layers of gas and dust. The upper left corner of the image is filled with mostly orange dust, and within that orange dust, there are several small red plumes of gas that extend from the top left to the bottom right at the same angle. At center-left is a larger star that is circled. This star has Webb’s signature diffraction spikes, but along the right also has an arc of white, with the circular edge starting at the center of the star. Mostly blue gas fills the center. There is a particularly bright central star. The gas to the right is a darker orange. Small points of light are sprinkled across the field. The brightest sources have extensive eight-pointed diffraction spikes.
A seemingly serene landscape of gas and dust is hopping with star formation behind the scenes.
Misty, bluish-white gas nearly fills this image. A few scattered stars shine through the gas. To the bottom left and just near a bright star, a dark cloud of dust interrupts the glowing, nebulous landscape.
A green and red aurora streams across Earth’s horizon above the city lights of Europe in this Jan. 19, 2026,...
A green and red aurora streams across Earth’s horizon above the city lights of Europe.
The Space Shuttle Challenger Memorial is seen during a wreath laying ceremony that was part of NASA's Day of Remembrance,...
A wreath with red and white flowers, green leaves, and white ribbon bows rests on a tripod stand with three thin metal legs. It stands in front of the Space Shuttle Challenger Memorial. The Memorial has two parts: A polished gray stone headstone with a bronze embossed plaque on it, resting on a small platform of rough gray stone. The plaque has the likeness of Challenger and the crew on it. Behind the memorial, we can see rows of white stone headstones.
NASA's massive Crawler-Transporter, upgraded for the Artemis program, carried the agency's SLS (Space Launch System) and Orion spacecraft on the...
NASA's Artemis II SLS rocket - with its distinctive butterscotch orange-brown color- and Orion spacecraft are on top of a massive platform. The platform has a banner with the Artemis logo on it on the left and an American flag on the right. The rocket and platform are moved by an immense machine called the crawler-transporter, which has treads like a tank. The view is from the ground up, so the deep blue sky is the background for most of this picture.
A bright reflection nebula shares the stage with a protostar and planet-forming disk in this Hubble image.
Within a ghostly blue and orange cloud of gas and dust, several stars shine brightly. To the upper left is a protoplanetary disk, appearing as a bright point flanked on either side by fan-shaped shadows. To the center right, stars are nestled in a cavity in the gas and dust.
NASA’s crawler-transporter 2 moves toward the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday, Jan. 9,...
A crawler-transporter, including its massive treads take up the majority of the image. In fact, the entire crawler cannot be seen. There are a few people at the top of the crawler, which allows you to see just how massive the machine is.
Jets of ionized gas streak across a cosmic landscape from a newly forming star.
Narrow, knotted clouds of purple and green glowing gas are seen against a field of stars. Some of the larger stars have diffraction spikes.
The New York–Newark–Jersey City Metropolitan Statistical Area, which spans 23 counties across New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut and has...
The New York–Newark–Jersey City Metropolitan Area at night. City lights illuminate most of the image.
NASA’s Pandora small satellite, and NASA-sponsored Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat (SPARCS), and Black Hole Coded Aperture Telescope (BlackCAT) CubeSat, are...
NASA’s Pandora small satellite, and NASA-sponsored Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat (SPARCS), and Black Hole Coded Aperture Telescope (BlackCAT) CubeSat, inside a SpaceX Falcon 9 payload fairing
This artist’s concept depicts a smaller white dwarf star pulling material from a larger star, right, into an accretion disk....
A smaller white dwarf star (middle left) pulls material from a larger star into a swirling accretion disk. The star is yellow with a brighter yellow rim. The material is multicolored, giving the disk surrounding the star a striped appearance. The larger star on the right is golden yellow.
Images depicting NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket are projected onto the Washington Monument as part of an event to...
A nighttime image of NASA's Artemis II SLS (Space Launch System) rocket is projected onto the Washington Monument. The SLS has an orange middle with two smaller boosters on either side. The Lincoln Memorial is illuminated in the foreground, and in the background, you can see the U.S. Capitol building's distinctive dome.
Artemis II crewmembers (left to right) NASA astronauts Christina Koch, mission specialist; and Victor Glover, pilot; CSA (Canadian Space Agency)...
Four astronauts in spacesuits walk through a small corridor, following another person. The photo is in black and white.