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NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

On flight day 6 (April 6) the Artemis II mission achieved a historic lunar flyby. Rounding the lunar far side, the deep space maneuver marked humanity's first venture to the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. The Orion spacecraft Integrity reached a maximum distance of nearly 407,000 kilometers, and the Artemis II crew, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen, set the record for the farthest distance from Earth traveled by any human since the Apollo 13 crew in 1970. From behind the Moon on flight day 6, a solar array wing camera recorded this space age selfie, framing the spacecraft and lunar far side. Planet Earth, home to the Artemis II crew, is the small, bright crescent beyond the lunar limb. The crew safely returned home on Artemis II mission flight day 10. Artemis II: Splashdown

Glendale tea estate with silver oak shade trees, verdant green and bright blue during a break from the monsoon rains. View from NH-181, Kattery, Nilgiris district, Tamil Nadu, India.

Timothy A. Gonsalves, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

Quino Al on Unsplash

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Some 60 million light-years away in the southerly constellation Corvus, two large galaxies are colliding. Stars in the two galaxies, cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, very rarely collide in the course of the ponderous cataclysm that lasts for hundreds of millions of years. But the galaxies' large clouds of molecular gas and dust often do, triggering furious episodes of star formation near the center of the cosmic wreckage. Spanning over 50 thousand light-years, this stunning telescopic frame also reveals new star clusters and matter flung far from the scene of the accident by gravitational tidal forces. The remarkably sharp ground-based image follows the faint tidal tails and distant background galaxies in the field of view. The suggestive overall visual appearance of the extended arcing structures gives the galaxy pair, also known as Arp 244, its popular name - The Antennae. Artemis II: mission updates

Photo by Mike Selby

Three pewter measuring cups.

Agnes Monkelbaan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler - (1834 - 1903) American Artist

Rohit Tandon on Unsplash

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

As the crew of Artemis II travelled towards the Moon this week, Comet C/2026 A1 (MAPS) was expected to have its closest approach to the Sun on Monday. At this point, comet and Sun would be closer than half the distance separating the Earth and Moon. The comet did not survive; the featured video was made with 40 hours of data and shows the comet plunging toward the Sun, like a moth to a flame. Observing the comet so close to our bright star requires a coronagraph, an instrument that blocks the Sun and is used for studies of its corona. This composite video combines, starting from the outside, views from: the wider angle coronagraph (blue) and the narrower angle coronagraph (red), both on NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, and NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (black). We can see the comet approaching the sun, stretching, disappearing behind the coronagraph's occulting disk and reappearing as a cloud of debris that dissipates.

View NASA’s Astronomy Photo of the Day