Category: Image of the day

LEDA 1313424, aptly nicknamed the Bullseye, is two and a half times the size of our Milky Way and has nine rings — six more than any other known galaxy. High-resolution imagery from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope confirmed eight rings, and data from the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii confirmed a ninth. Hubble and Keck also confirmed which galaxy dove through the Bullseye, creating these rings: the blue dwarf galaxy that sits to its immediate center-left.

Engineers and technicians with NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems Program prepare to lift the left center center booster segment shown with the iconic NASA “worm” insignia for the agency’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket to the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday, Jan. 24, 2025.

A crane lowers the 112-foot-wide (34-meter-wide) steel framework for the Deep Space Station 23 (DSS-23) reflector dish into position on Dec. 18, 2024, at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone Space Communications Complex near Barstow, California. A multi-frequency beam waveguide antenna, DSS-23 will boost the DSN’s capacity and enhance NASA’s deep space communications capabilities for decades to come.

NASA’s SPHEREx observatory is oriented in a horizontal position, revealing all three layers of photon shields as well as the telescope. This photo was taken at BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado, in April 2024.

Short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, SPHEREx will create a map of the cosmos like no other. Using a technique called spectroscopy to image the entire sky in 102 wavelengths of infrared light, SPHEREx will gather information about the composition of and distance to millions of galaxies and stars. With this map, scientists will study what happened in the first fraction of a second after the big bang, how galaxies formed and evolved, and the origins of water in planetary systems in our galaxy.

Springtime in the South Polar region of Mars is a season of exciting activity. The thick coating of carbon dioxide ice that accumulated over the winter begins to sublimate (turn to vapor) as the sun rises higher in the sky and warms the ice. Sunlight penetrates through the transparent ice, and is absorbed at the base of the ice layer. The gas that forms as a result of the warming escapes through weaknesses in the ice and erupts in the form of magnificent geysers of gas and dust.

The full Moon, also known in January as the Wolf Moon, rises above the Lincoln Memorial and the Memorial Bridge, Monday, Jan. 13, 2025, as seen from Arlington, Virginia.

An inquisitive sandhill crane approaches the photographer near the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on March 24, 2021. Kennedy shares space with the Merritt Island National Wildlife refuge, which is home to more than 1,000 species of plants, 117 species of fish, 68 amphibians and reptiles, 330 birds, and 31 different mammals. The refuge provides a favorable environment for sandhill cranes as it contains shallow freshwater habitats for nesting, along with a variety of vegetation and prey to feed on.

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a dusty yet sparkling scene from one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud. The Large Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy situated about 160,000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa.

This is an artist’s concept of a two-person Gemini spacecraft in flight, showing a cutaway view. The Gemini program was designed as a bridge between the Mercury and Apollo programs.

NASA astronaut and Expedition 72 commander Suni Williams is pictured during a spacewalk outside the International Space Station where she replaced a rate gyro assembly that helps maintain the orientation of the orbital outpost.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial is seen in the foreground with the Washington Monument in the background, Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025, in Washington. The memorial covers four acres and includes the Stone of Hope, a granite statue of civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King Jr. carved by sculptor Lei Yixin.

Released on Nov. 3, 2023, in honor of Jupiter reaching opposition, which occurs when the planet and the Sun are in opposite sides of the sky, this view of the gas giant planet includes the iconic, massive storm called the “Great Red Spot.”

Chief of aerodynamics Elton W. Miller ponders the future of the Sperry M-1 Messenger, the first full-scale airplane tested in the Propeller Research Tunnel. Miller was one of the designers of the Propeller Research Tunnel.