Launches
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The launch archive is still being mirrored, so this day has no launches listed yet.
ARCHIVE // DAY OF YEAR
February 25 in spaceflight
Below are the pictures NASA published on February 25 in 6 different years — each one taken or released on this exact date.
Recorded events
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Wikipedia records no spaceflight or astronomy event on this date.
Pictures from this date
PUBLISHED6IMAGES
NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for February 25, one per year. Some are public domain and some belong to the photographer — each says which.
Published on February 25
NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, for this calendar date in each of the last several years.
2026
The Egg Nebula from the Hubble Telescope
ver wonder what it would look like to crack open the Sun? The Egg Nebula, a dying Sun-like star, can unscramble this question. Pictured is a combination of several visible and infrared images of the nebula (also known as RAFGL 2688 or CRL 2688) taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. The star has shed its outer layers, and a bright, hot core (or "yolk") now illuminates the milky "egg white" shells of gas and dust surrounding the center. The central lobes and rings are structures of gas and dust recently ejected into space, with the dust being dense enough to block our view of the stellar core. Light beams emanate from that blocked core, escaping through holes carved in the older ejected material by newer, faster jets expelled from the star’s poles. Astronomers are still trying to figure out what causes the disks, lobes, and jets during this short (only a few thousand years!) phase of the star’s evolution, making this an egg-cellent image to study! APOD Front Page: apod.nasa.gov
© ESA/Hubble & NASA, B. Balick (U. Washington) — used with the credit NASA publishes
2025
M41: The Little Beehive Star Cluster
Why are there so many bright blue stars? Stars are usually born in clusters, and the brightest and most massive of these stars typically glow blue. Less-bright, non-blue stars like our Sun surely also exist in this M41 star cluster but are harder to see. A few bright orange-appearing red giant stars are visible. The red-light filaments are emitted by diffuse hydrogen gas, a color that was specifically filtered and enhanced in this image. In a hundred million years or so, the bright blue stars will have exploded in supernovas and disappeared, while the slightly different trajectories of the fainter stars will cause this picturesque open cluster to disperse. Similarly, billions of years ago, our own Sun was likely born into a star cluster like M41, but it has long since drifted apart from its sister stars. The featured image was captured over four hours with Chilescope T2 in Chile.
© Xinran Li — used with the credit NASA publishes
2024
A Phoenix Aurora over Iceland
All of the other aurora watchers had gone home. By 3:30 am in Iceland, on a quiet September night, much of that night's auroras had died down. Suddenly, unexpectedly, a new burst of particles streamed down from space, lighting up the Earth's atmosphere once again. This time, surprisingly, pareidoliacally, the night lit up with an amazing shape reminiscent of a giant phoenix. With camera equipment at the ready, two quick sky images were taken, followed immediately by a third of the land. The mountain in the background is Helgafell, while the small foreground river is called Kaldá, both located about 30 kilometers north of Iceland's capital Reykjavík. Seasoned skywatchers will note that just above the mountain, toward the left, is the constellation of Orion, while the Pleiades star cluster is also visible just above the frame center. The 2016 aurora, which lasted only a minute and was soon gone forever -- would possibly be dismissed as a fanciful fable -- were it not captured in the featured, digitally-composed, image mosaic. Your Sky Surprise: What picture did APOD feature on your birthday? (post 1995)
© Hallgrimur P. Helgason; Rollover Annotation: Judy Schmidt — used with the credit NASA publishes
2023
Crescent Moon Occultation
On February 22, a young Moon shared the western sky at sunset with bright planets Venus and Jupiter along the ecliptic plane. The beautiful celestial conjunction was visible around planet Earth. But from some locations Jupiter hid for a while, occulted by the crescent lunar disk. The Solar System's ruling gas giant was captured here just before it disappeared behind the Moon's dark edge, seen over the Río de la Plata at Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay. In the serene river and skyscape Venus is not so shy, shining brightly closer to the horizon through the fading twilight. Next week Venus and Jupiter will appear even closer in your evening sky.
© Fefo Bouvier — used with the credit NASA publishes
2022
Perseverance Sol 354
This Navcam mosaic from Perseverance looks out over the car-sized rover's deck, across the floor of Jezero crater on Mars. Frames used to construct the mosaic view were captured on mission sol 354. That corresponds to Earth calendar date February 17, 2022, nearly one Earth year after the rover's landing. With a mass of over 1,000 kilograms, six-wheeled Perseverance is the heaviest rover to touch down on Mars. During its first year of exploration the rover has collected six (so far) rock core samples for later return to planet Earth, served as the base station for Ingenuity, the first helicopter on Mars, and tested MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment), converting some of the Red Planet’s thin, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere into oxygen.
NASA · public domain
2021
A Venus Flyby
On a mission to explore the inner heliosphere and solar corona, on July 11, 2020 the Wide-field Imager on board NASA's Parker Solar Probe captured this stunning view of the nightside of Venus at distance of about 12,400 kilometers (7,693 miles). The spacecraft was making the third of seven gravity-assist flybys of the inner planet. The gravity-asssist flybys are designed to use the approach to Venus to help the probe alter its orbit to ultimately come within 6 million kilometers (4 million miles) of the solar surface in late 2025. A surprising image, the side-looking camera seems to peer through the clouds to show a dark feature near the center known as Aphrodite Terra, the largest highland region on the Venusian surface. The bright rim at the edge of the planet is nightglow likely emitted by excited oxygen atoms recombining into molecules in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Bright streaks and blemishes throughout the image are likely due to energetic charged particles, and dust near the camera reflecting sunlight. Skygazers from planet Earth probably recognize the familiar stars of Orion's belt and sword at lower right.
NASA · public domain
Sources and licences
Event text and thumbnails come from Wikipedia and are used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Images are drawn only from Wikimedia Commons, which does not accept non-free content — each thumbnail links to its file page, where its licence and author are recorded.
Launch records are from The Space Devs’ Launch Library 2. This archive is still being mirrored, so some days are incomplete. Pictures are NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day; NASA imagery is generally not subject to copyright, but individual APOD entries are frequently the property of the photographer, and each caption says which applies.
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Pale Blue Dot — Carl Sagan
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