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Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)
APOD: 2025 October 9 Á The Jenga Moon
8.10.2025
That big, bright, beautiful Full Moon you watched rise on the night of October 6 was the Harvest Moon. Famed in festival, story, and song, Harvest Moon is just the traditional name of the full moon nearest the time of the northern hemisphere's autumnal equinox. According to lore the name is a fitting one.
APOD: 2025 October 8 Á NGC 7380: The Wizard Nebula
7.10.2025
What powers are being wielded in the Wizard Nebula? Gravitation strong enough to form stars, and stellar winds and radiations powerful enough to create and dissolve towers of gas. Located only 8,000 light years away, the Wizard nebula, featured here, surrounds a developing open star cluster NGC 7380.
APOD: 2025 October 7 Á SN Encore: A Second Supernova Seen Several Times
6.10.2025
Now a second supernova in this same galaxy is repeating. The cause is the gravitational lens effect of a massive foreground cluster of galaxies (MACS J0138) -- it creates multiple images of a perfectly aligned background galaxy (MRG-M0138). What's particularly interesting is that this background galaxy has young stars that keep blowing up.
APOD: 2025 October 6 Á The Changing Ion Tail of Comet Lemmon
5.10.2025
How does a comet tail change? It depends on the comet. The ion tail of Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) has been changing markedly, as detailed in the featured image sequenced over six days between September 25 and October 4 (left to right) from Texas, USA.
APOD: 2025 October 5 Á A Long Storm System on Saturn
4.10.2025
It was one of the largest and longest lived storms ever recorded in our Solar System. First seen in late 2010, the featured cloud formation in the northern hemisphere of Saturn started larger than the Earth and soon spread completely around the planet.
APOD: 2025 October 4 Á The Rotating Moon
3.10.2025
No one on Earth sees the Moon rotate like this. That's because the Moon is tidally locked in synchronous rotation, showing only one side to denizens of our fair planet. Still, given modern...
APOD: 2025 October 3 Á Pandora's Cluster of Galaxies
2.10.2025
This deep field mosaicked image presents a stunning view of galaxy cluster Abell 2744 recorded by the James Webb Space Telescope's NIRCam. Also dubbed Pandora's Cluster, Abell 2744 itself appears to be a ponderous merger of three different massive galaxy clusters. It lies some 3.5 billion light-years away, toward the constellation Sculptor.
APOD: 2025 October 2 Á Pluto at Night
1.10.2025
The night side of Pluto spans this shadowy scene. In the stunning spacebased perspective, the Sun is 4.9 billion kilometers (almost 4.5 light-hours) behind the dim and distant world. It was captured by far flung New Horizons in July of 2015 when the spacecraft was at a range of some 21,000 kilometers from Pluto.
APOD: 2025 October 1 Á NGC 6960: The Witchs Broom Nebula
30.09.2025
Ten thousand years ago, before the dawn of recorded human history, a new light would 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.
APOD: 2025 September 30 Á Comet Lemmon Brightens
29.09.2025
Comet Lemmon is brightening and moving into morning northern skies. Besides Comet SWAN25B and Comet ATLAS, Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) is now the third comet currently visible with binoculars and on long camera exposures. Comet Lemmon was discovered early this year and is still headed into the inner Solar System.
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