The rest of this site looks at the sky over your head tonight. This room looks at the frontier — where the great telescopes are pointed right now, what they just sent home, and the images that redefined what we can see.
A million miles out at the L2 point, the James Webb Space Telescope works through a schedule planned to the second. This is the piece of sky it's staring at, this minute — shown here as ground-based surveys see it. Webb sees far deeper.
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The newest public science frames on the ground — days old, unprocessed, straight from the archive. The frontier before the press releases.
NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day — a fresh view of the cosmos every morning, chosen and explained by professional astronomers.
It looks like a mountain range at dusk, but those "peaks" are the edge of a vast cavity in a stellar nursery 7,600 light-years away, carved out by radiation from enormous young stars just above the frame. Webb sees in infrared, which slips through the dust that blocks visible light — so the specks of light dotting the gas are newborn stars no ordinary telescope could find. The tallest "peaks" are about seven light-years high.
7,600 light-years — this light left around 5,600 BC NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI · click to stand closer · full resolution →The images that redefined what we can see. Click one: it fills the screen and drifts. And mind the year on each — you're not looking at space, you're looking at the past.
Every speck here is a galaxy, in a patch of sky you could cover with a grain of sand held at arm's length. The cluster in front is so massive its gravity bends and magnifies the light of galaxies far behind it — some of it over 13 billion years old, from near the dawn of the universe.
Up to 13 billion years — older than the Sun NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
A dying Sun-like star, 2,500 light-years off, throwing off shells of gas and dust over thousands of years. Webb's infrared eyes revealed for the first time that a second, dimmer star is orbiting inside and stirring the rings — the kind of detail that rewrites how we picture a star's death.
2,500 light-years — this light left around 500 BC NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
The wreckage of a star that exploded in 1054 AD — bright enough that astronomers recorded it in daylight. Nearly a thousand years later the debris is still racing outward, 6,500 light-years away, lit from within by a city-sized neutron star spinning thirty times a second.
6,500 light-years — this light left around 4,500 BC NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage TeamPulled live from NASA's image library — these rows grow on their own as Webb and Hubble release new images.
Raw frames from the Perseverance rover, hours-to-days old — loading…
In 1994 the answer was zero. The count climbs almost weekly as the great observatories and survey telescopes keep finding worlds — this number is live from the NASA Exoplanet Archive.
The live panels at the top come straight from the instruments: Webb's pointing from STScI's weekly observing schedule, with the sky patch rendered on demand from the Digitized Sky Survey by CDS's hips2fits service; new-data thumbnails from the public MAST archive; Mars raw images from NASA/JPL; the planet count from the NASA Exoplanet Archive. The gallery below is hand-curated — the great telescope images are released on their own schedule and chosen for impact. Every image links to its source at full resolution.