NASA: Image of the day

NASA astronaut Bob Hines took this picture of the waning crescent moon on May 8, 2022, as the International Space Station flew into an orbital sunrise 260 miles above the Atlantic Ocean off the northwest coast of the United States.

NASA astronaut Zena Cardman inspects her spacesuit’s wrist mirror at the NASA Johnson Space Center photo studio on March 22, 2024.

Arsia Mons, one of the Red Planet’s largest volcanoes, peeks through a blanket of water ice clouds in this image captured by NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter on May 2, 2025.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.