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This dream-like image of Mir was recorded by astronauts as the Space Shuttle Atlantis approached the Russian space station prior to docking during the STS-76 mission. Sporting spindly appendages and solar panels, Mir resembles a whimsical flying insect hovering about 350 kilometers above New Zealand's South Island and the city of Nelson near Cook Strait. In late March 1996, Atlantis shuttled astronaut Shannon W. Lucid to Mir for a five month visit, increasing Mir's occupancy from 2 to 3. It returned to pick Lucid up and drop off astronaut John Blaha during the STS-79 mission in August of that year. Since becoming operational in 1986, Mir has been visited by over 100 spacefarers from the nations of planet Earth including, Russia, the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, Japan, Austria, Kazakhstan and Slovakia. After joint Shuttle-Mir training missions in support of the International Space Station, continuous occupation of Mir ended in August 1999. The Mir was deorbited in March 2001.

$Perhaps the most famous star cluster on the sky, the Pleiades can be seen without binoculars from even the depths of a light-polluted city. Also known as the Seven Sisters and M45, the Pleiades is one of the brightest and closest open clusters. The Pleiades contains over 3000 stars, is about 400 light years away, and only 13 light years across. Quite evident in the above photograph are the blue reflection nebulae that surround the brighter cluster stars. Low mass, faint, brown dwarfs have also been found in the Pleiades. (Editors' note: The prominent diffraction spikes were added to the image for aesthetic reasons, produced by kite string donated by Rob Gendler's kids and placed over the telescope dew shield.)$

On September 18, the setting Sun illuminated both sides of the steep brick and steel canyon otherwise known as Jasper Avenue in downtown Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, planet Earth. The Stonehenge-like alignment is captured from the middle of the road in this daring snapshot. In Edmonton streets are laid out on a grid almost oriented along the cardinal directions, so aligned Edmonton sunsets (and sunrises) occur along the nearly east-west streets twice a year, close to the Equinox. In fact, at today's Equinox, the Sun crosses the celestial equator at 1421 UT and on this day the Sun will rise due east and set due west, bringing approximately equal hours of day and night to denizens of planet Earth. The September Equinox marks the astronomical beginning of Fall in the north and Spring in the southern hemisphere.

NASA's Europa Clipper is now headed toward an ocean world beyond Earth. The large spacecraft is tucked into the payload fairing atop the Falcon Heavy rocket in this photo, taken at Kennedy Space Center the day before the mission's successful October 14 launch. Europa Clipper's interplanetary voyage will first take it to Mars, then back to Earth, and then on to Jupiter on gravity assist trajectories that will allow it to enter orbit around Jupiter in April 2030. Once orbiting Jupiter, the spacecraft will fly past Europa 49 times, exploring a Jovian moon with a global subsurface ocean that may have conditions to support life. Posing in the background next to the floodlit rocket is Comet Tsuchinsan-ATLAS, about a day after the comet's closest approach to Earth. A current darling of evening skies, the naked-eye comet is a visitor from the distant Oort cloud Growing Gallery: Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS in 2024

Which way to the interstate? What appears to be a caricature of a complex highway system on Earth is actually a system of ridges and cracks on the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. The distance between parallel ridges in the above photograph is typically about 1 kilometer. The complexity of the cracks and ridges tell a story of Europa's past that is mostly undecipherable -- planetary geologists try to understand just the general origin of the overall features. One noteworthy feature is the overall white sheen, possibly indicating the presence of frost. Another is the dark centers between parallel ridges, which might indicate that dirty water from an underground ocean recently welled up in the cracks and froze. Recent research indicates that enough carbon exists to support an underwater biosphere, but that Europa's ice crust may be over three kilometers thick in some places.

$Part of the Sun disappeared earlier this month, but few people were worried. The missing part, which included the center from some locations, just went behind the Moon in what is known as an annular solar eclipse. Featured here is an eclipse sequence taken as the Moon was overtaking the rising Sun in the sky. The foreground hill is Factory Butte in Utah, USA. The rays flaring out from the Sun are not real -- they result from camera aperture diffraction and are known as sunstar. The Moon is real, but appears only in silhouette in this ring-of-fire eclipse. As stunning as this eclipse sequence is, it was considered just practice by the astrophotographer. The reason? She hopes to use this experience to better photograph the total solar eclipse that will occur over North America on April 8, 2024. Apply today (USA): Become a NASA Partner Eclipse Ambassador Eclipse Album: Selected images sent in to APOD$

Spiral galaxy ESO 137-001 hurtles through massive galaxy cluster Abell 3627 some 220 million light years away. The distant galaxy is seen in this colorful Hubble/Chandra composite image through a foreground of the Milky Way's stars toward the southern constellation Triangulum Australe. As the spiral speeds along at nearly 7 million kilometers per hour, its gas and dust are stripped away when ram pressure with the cluster's own hot, tenuous intracluster medium overcomes the galaxy's gravity. Evident in Hubble's near visible light data, bright star clusters have formed in the stripped material along the short, trailing blue streaks. Chandra's X-ray data shows off the enormous extent of the heated, stripped gas as diffuse, darker blue trails stretching over 400,000 light-years toward the bottom right. The significant loss of dust and gas will make new star formation difficult for this galaxy. A yellowish elliptical galaxy, lacking in star forming dust and gas, is just to the right of ESO 137-001 in the frame.

Vues des vaisseaux spatiaux Soyouz et Progress au-dessus de la Terre, avec des nuages visibles en arrière-plan.

The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first object on Charles Messier's famous list of things which are not comets. In fact, the cosmic Crab is now known to be a supernova remnant, an expanding cloud of debris from the death explosion of a massive star. Light from that stellar catastrophe was first witnessed by astronomers on planet Earth in the year 1054. Composed of 24 exposures taken in October 1999, January 2000, and December 2000, this Hubble Space Telescope mosaic spans about twelve light years. Colors in the intricate filaments trace the light emitted from atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur in the debris cloud. The spooky blue interior glow is emitted by high-energy electrons accelerated by the Crab's central pulsar. One of the most exotic objects known to modern astronomers, the pulsar is a neutron star, the spinning remnant of the collapsed stellar core. The Crab Nebula lies about 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus.

Composite image of NGC 1672, a barred spiral galaxy, showing its arms and core in various wavelengths. Credit: X-ray: Chandra: NASA/CXC/SAO; XMM: ESA/XMM-Newton; IR: JWST: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Spitzer: NASA/JPL/CalTech; Optical: Hubble: NASA/ESA/STScI, ESO; Image Processing: L. Frattare, J. Major, and K. Arcand

Many think it is just a myth. Others think it is true but its cause isn't known. Adventurers pride themselves on having seen it. It's a green flash from the Sun. The truth is the green flash does exist and its cause is well understood. Just as the setting Sun disappears completely from view, a last glimmer appears startlingly green. The effect is typically visible only from locations with a low, distant horizon, and lasts just a few seconds. A green flash is also visible for a rising Sun, but takes better timing to spot. A dramatic green flash was caught in the above photograph in 1992 from Finland. The Sun itself does not turn partly green, the effect is caused by layers of the Earth's atmosphere acting like a prism.