Imagery archive

27 September 2026

Kish from orbit

Kish from orbit

True colour, from the MODIS instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite.

NASA Worldview / GIBS

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The Persian Gulf by day

The Persian Gulf by day

The whole Persian Gulf in one pass, with the coastlines drawn on.

NASA Worldview / GIBS

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The Persian Gulf at night

The Persian Gulf at night

VIIRS is sensitive enough to image city light: this is the region drawn by where people are.

NASA Worldview / GIBS

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Andromeda before Photoshop

Andromeda before Photoshop

NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.

What does the Andromeda galaxy really look like? The featured image shows how our Milky Way Galaxy's closest major galactic neighbor really appears in a long exposure through Earth's busy skies and with a digital camera that introduces normal imperfections. The picture is a stack of 223 images, each a 300 second exposure, taken from a garden observatory in Portugal during 2019. Obvious image deficiencies include bright parallel airplane trails, long and continuous satellite trails, short cosmic ray streaks, and bad pixels. These imperfections were actually not removed with Photoshop specifically, but rather greatly reduced with a series of computer software packages that included Astro Pixel Processor, DeepSkyStacker, and PixInsight. All of this work was done not to deceive you with a digital fantasy that has little to do with the real likeness of the Andromeda galaxy (M31), but to minimize Earthly artifacts that have nothing to do with the distant galaxy and so better recreate what M31 really does look like. APOD's email for image submissions has changed. Please see: APOD Submissions APOD's main NASA site is moving: From apod.nasa.gov to science.nasa.gov/apod

This explanation is in English; it has not been translated.

NASA APOD