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Picture of the Day

A close-up view of the Sun's surface shows a swirling, fibrous texture in deep orange and red, resembling flowing fur or fabric. A dark, arching loop of cooler gas curves across the center, and the tiny black silhouette of the space station, with its solar panels and modules visible, sits just to its upper right.

Caught in transit

A jagged, heavily cratered lunar landscape curves along the horizon, lit at a low, raking angle so every crater rim and ridge casts a long, sharp shadow. Countless overlapping craters of all sizes cover the gray surface, fading into darkness where the Moon's curve meets black sky.

The Moon’s hidden southwest corner

Bright orange-gold clouds billow upward across the bottom of the frame, their edges rimmed with fire against a deep blue background streaked with dark, wispy filaments. A patch of green cloud glows in the upper right corner, and a bright star shines at the lower left amid a scattering of faint stars.

The Pelican aglow

A glowing, ring-shaped cloud sits at the center of a dense star field, with a bright blue-green disk in the middle surrounded by a thick band of pink and magenta. Wispy, cloud-like red tendrils drift outward unevenly from the ring, reaching farther out toward the right side and giving the whole shape a lopsided, eye-like look. Countless small white, blue, and orange stars fill the dark background around it.

A glowing eye

A small, bright teal-green fuzzy ball glows near the center of a dense starfield. A hair-thin straight line of light runs horizontally across the whole frame, passing through the green ball on both sides. The background holds many colorful pinpoint stars and faint brownish haze, with one bright orange star to the right.

Tempel’s trail strengthens

A bright crescent moon glows near the top of a deep blue night sky, with a faint cluster of stars just beside it and scattered stars across the darkness above. Below, a rocky coastline stretches across the frame — a low, tree-covered island and a tall pointed sea stack rise from calm water, silhouetted against a soft pink and orange glow along the horizon. Scattered lights dot the shoreline on the left, reflecting faintly in the still water in the foreground.

Wanderers of the sky and sea

A dark, twisting column of dust with glowing pink edges curls up from the lower part of the frame toward a small, bright knot near the center. It sits amid vast clouds of deep red and dusky blue-gray gas, sprinkled with hundreds of stars across the field.

A dusty trunk

Large glowing clouds fill the frame. One deep red cloud at upper left is split by angular rays of blue light. A deeper blue cloud lies at lower right; a red arc runs up from it to the upper right corner of the frame. Together, these features appear to make up a lion’s head, body, and tail, respectively. The frame is threaded by dark, winding lanes of dust. A dense scattering of small white stars covers the whole scene.

The lion roars

The kingdom’s frontier

On a black, star-filled background float two large, wispy blue bubbles of gas. The rounder one at left has a small bright pink-and-white knot at its lower edge. The bigger, more tangled structure at right blends pale blue filaments with patches of red, all scattered across thousands of faint stars.

An extragalactic supernova remnant

Rings within rings

A large, glowing cloud of gas fills the frame against a dense starfield. Its center glows teal and blue, ringed and streaked by billowing gold, orange, and rust-brown clouds, with dark lanes of dust winding through the right side. The colors are vivid and painterly.

A stellar nursery in Cygnus

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