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February 26 in spaceflight
Wikipedia records 7 spaceflight and astronomy events on February 26. Below are the pictures NASA published on February 26 in 6 different years — each one taken or released on this exact date.
Recorded events
IN THE RECORD7ENTRIES
Spaceflight and astronomy entries from Wikipedia's record of this date, oldest first — from -747 onward.
Pictures from this date
PUBLISHED6IMAGES
NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for February 26, one per year. Some are public domain and some belong to the photographer — each says which.
Published on February 26
NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, for this calendar date in each of the last several years.
2026
Webb and Hubble: IC 5332
What does the universe look like through infrared goggles? Our eyes can only see visible light, but astronomers want to see more. Today’s APOD shows spiral galaxy IC 5332 as seen by two NASA telescopes: Webb in mid-infrared and Hubble in ultraviolet and visible light. To toggle between the two space-based views just slide your cursor over the image (or follow this link). The Hubble image highlights the spiral arms of the galaxy separated by dark regions, whereas the Webb image reveals a finer, more tangled structure. Interstellar dust scatters and absorbs light from the stars in the galaxy, causing the dark dust lanes in the Hubble image, and then emits heat in infrared light, so dust glows in this Webb image. The Mid-InfraRed Instrument on Webb needs to operate at a chilling temperature of -266ºC (or - 447ºF), otherwise it would detect infrared radiation from the telescope itself. Combining these observations, astronomers connect the “small scale” of gas and stars to the truly large scale of galactic structure and evolution.
NASA · public domain
2025
Einstein Ring Surrounds Nearby Galaxy Center
Do you see the ring? If you look very closely at the center of the featured galaxy NGC 6505, a ring becomes evident. It is the gravity of NGC 6505, the nearby (z = 0.042) elliptical galaxy that you can easily see, that is magnifying and distorting the image of a distant galaxy into a complete circle. To create a complete Einstein ring there must be perfect alignment of the nearby galaxy's center and part of the background galaxy. Analysis of this ring and the multiple images of the background galaxy help to determine the mass and fraction of dark matter in NGC 6505's center, as well as uncover previously unseen details in the distorted galaxy. The featured image was captured by ESA's Earth-orbiting Euclid telescope in 2023 and released earlier this month.
© ESA, NASA, Euclid Consortium; Processing: J.-C. Cuillandre, G. Anselmi, T. Li — used with the credit NASA publishes
2024
Martian Moon Eclipses Martian Moon
What if there were two moons in the sky -- and they eclipsed each other? This happens on Mars. The featured video shows a version of this unusual eclipse from space. Pictured are the two moons of Mars: the larger Phobos, which orbits closer to the red planet, and the smaller Deimos, which orbits further out. The sequence was captured last year by the ESA’s Mars Express, a robotic spacecraft that itself orbits Mars. A similar eclipse is visible from the Martian surface, although very rarely. From the surface, though, the closer moon Phobos would appear to pass in front of farther moon Deimos. Most oddly, Phobos orbits Mars so close that it appears to move backwards when compared to Earth's Moon from Earth, rising in west and setting in the east. Phobos, the closer moon, orbits so close and so fast that it passes nearly overhead about three times a day.
NASA · public domain
2023
Saturn's Iapetus: Moon with a Strange Surface
What would make a moon look like a walnut? A strange ridge that circles Saturn's moon Iapetus's equator, visible near the bottom of the featured image, makes it appear similar to a popular edible nut. The origin of the ridge remains unknown, though, with hypotheses including ice that welled up from below, a ring that crashed down from above, and structure left over from its formation perhaps 100 million years ago. Also strange is that about half of Iapetus is so dark that it can nearly disappear when viewed from Earth, while the rest is, reflectively, quite bright. Observations show that the degree of darkness of the terrain is strangely uniform, as if a dark coating was somehow recently applied to an ancient and highly cratered surface. Last, several large impact basins occur around Iapetus, with a 400-kilometer wide crater visible near the image center, surrounded by deep cliffs that drop sharply to the crater floor. The featured image was taken by the Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft during a flyby of Iapetus at the end of 2004.
NASA · public domain
2022
Nearby Spiral Galaxy NGC 4945
Large spiral galaxy NGC 4945 is seen nearly edge-on in this cosmic galaxy close-up. It's almost the size of our Milky Way Galaxy. NGC 4945's own dusty disk, young blue star clusters, and pink star forming regions stand out in the colorful telescopic frame. About 13 million light-years distant toward the expansive southern constellation Centaurus, NGC 4945 is only about six times farther away than Andromeda, the nearest large spiral galaxy to the Milky Way. Though this galaxy's central region is largely hidden from view for optical telescopes, X-ray and infrared observations indicate significant high energy emission and star formation in the core of NGC 4945. Its obscured but active nucleus qualifies the gorgeous island universe as a Seyfert galaxy and home to a central supermassive black hole.
© Dietmar Hager — used with the credit NASA publishes
2021
Mars Perseverance Sol 3
Stitched together on planet Earth, 142 separate images make up this 360 degree panorama from the floor of Jezero Crater on Mars. The high-resolution color images were taken by the Perseverance rover's zoomable Mastcam-Z during mission sol 3, also known as February 21, 2021. In the foreground of Mastcam-Z's view is the car-sized rover's deck. Broad light-colored patches in the martian soil just beyond it were scoured by descent stage rocket engines during the rover's dramatic arrival on February 18. The rim of 45 kilometer-wide Jezero Crater rises in the distance. In the coming sols, Perseverance will explore the ancient lake-delta system in the crater, hunting for signs of past microscopic life and collecting samples for potential future return to planet Earth.
NASA · public domain
What happened on February 26
-747
According to Ptolemy, the reign of the Babylonian king Nabonassar (name in Akkadian pictured) began, marking a new era characterized by the systematic maintenance of chronologically precise historical records.
740s BC ↗
-747
According to Ptolemy, the epoch (origin) of the Nabonassar Era began at noon on this date. Historians use this to establish the modern BC chronology for dating historic events.
Ptolemy ↗
1616
Galileo Galilei is formally banned by the Roman Catholic Church from teaching or defending the view that the earth orbits the sun.
Galileo affair ↗
1935
With the aid of a radio station in Daventry, England, and two receiving antennae, Scottish engineer and inventor Robert Watson-Watt first demonstrated the use of radar.
Daventry ↗
1935
Robert Watson-Watt carries out a demonstration near Daventry which leads directly to the development of radar in the United Kingdom.
Robert Watson-Watt ↗
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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Cosmos — Carl Sagan
Still the best single argument for why any of this matters, and it leaves the arithmetic in. For a reader who wants the science, not just the awe.
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Pale Blue Dot — Carl Sagan
The case for leaving Earth, written by someone unsentimental about how hard that is. Suits readers who want the argument rather than the poster.
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Project Hail Mary — Andy Weir
Hard-SF problem solving in The Martian's key — for anyone who liked the engineering more than the peril. The only novel on this list.
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