Image of the Day

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company's Dragon spacecraft is launched on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission to the International...

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...

$A rectangular image of the Serpens Nebula with black vertical rectangles at the bottom left and top right to indicate missing data. A young star-forming region is filled with wispy orange, red, and blue layers of gas and dust. The upper left corner of the image is filled with mostly orange dust, and within that orange dust, there are several small red plumes of gas that extend from the top left to the bottom right at the same angle. At center-left is a larger star that is circled. This star has Webb’s signature diffraction spikes, but along the right also has an arc of white, with the circular edge starting at the center of the star. Mostly blue gas fills the center. There is a particularly bright central star. The gas to the right is a darker orange. Small points of light are sprinkled across the field. The brightest sources have extensive eight-pointed diffraction spikes.$