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June 26 in spaceflight

23 orbital launches flew on June 26, the earliest of them in 1958, and 19 reached orbit. Wikipedia records 1 spaceflight and astronomy event on June 26. Below are the pictures NASA published on June 26 in 6 different years — each one taken or released on this exact date.

Launches

ON RECORD

23MISSIONS

19 of them reached orbit. The earliest was 1958, the most recent 2026.

Recorded events

IN THE RECORD

1ENTRY

Spaceflight and astronomy entries from Wikipedia's record of this date, oldest first — from 1974 onward.

Pictures from this date

PUBLISHED

6IMAGES

NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for June 26, one per year. Some are public domain and some belong to the photographer — each says which.

Published on June 26

NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, for this calendar date in each of the last several years.

Milky Way Urban Style

2026

Milky Way Urban Style

In a cosmic vista you can never see, the Milky Way arcs through the night above Seoul, South Korea. Remarkably, this urban night skyscape reveals our galaxy's faintly luminous central region and dark obscuring dust clouds in spite of the brilliant city lights. To overcome the extreme light pollution of the metropolitan area and record faint cosmic details, an infrared filter was used to capture the night scene in a single exposure. While the filter transmits predominately infrared light, it still passes some visible light to give the scene a natural appearance. The view is from Seoul's Ttukseom Hangang Park, with the Han River and a well lit railway bridge across the foreground. The 123 story Lotte World Tower looms in the distance, the tallest building in South Korea.

© Shingoo Lee — used with the credit NASA publishes

The Seagull Nebula

2025

The Seagull Nebula

An interstellar expanse of glowing gas and obscuring dust presents a bird-like visage to astronomers from planet Earth, suggesting its popular moniker, the Seagull Nebula. This broadband portrait of the cosmic bird covers a 3.5-degree wide swath across the plane of the Milky Way, in the direction of Sirius, alpha star of the constellation of the Big Dog (Canis Major). The bright head of the Seagull Nebula is cataloged as IC 2177, a compact, dusty emission and reflection nebula with embedded massive star HD 53367. The larger emission region, encompassing objects with other catalog designations, is Likely part of an extensive shell structure swept up by successive supernova explosions. The notable bluish arc below and right of center is a bow shock from runaway star FN Canis Majoris. Dominated by the reddish glow of atomic hydrogen, this complex of interstellar gas and dust clouds with other stars of the Canis Majoris OB1 association spans over 200 light-years at the Seagull Nebula's estimated 3,800 light-year distance.

© Timothy Martin — used with the credit NASA publishes

Timelapse: Aurora, SAR, and the Milky Way

2024

Timelapse: Aurora, SAR, and the Milky Way

What's happening in the sky this unusual night? Most striking in the featured 4.5-hour 360-degree panoramic video, perhaps, is the pink and purple aurora. That's because this night, encompassing May 11, was famous for its auroral skies around the world. As the night progresses, auroral bands shimmer, the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy rises, and stars shift as the Earth rotates beneath them. Captured here simultaneously is a rare red band running above the aurora: a SAR arc, seen to change only slightly. The flashing below the horizon is caused by passing cars, while the moving spots in the sky are satellites and airplanes. The featured video was captured from Xinjiang, China with four separate cameras.

© Jeff Dai (TWAN); Music: Ibaotu catalog number 771024 (Used with permission) — used with the credit NASA publishes

The Belt of Venus over Mount Everest

2023

The Belt of Venus over Mount Everest

You've surely seen it, but you might not have noticed it. During a cloudless twilight, just before sunrise or after sunset, part of the atmosphere above the horizon appears slightly dark and off-color. Called the Belt of Venus, this transitional band between the dark eclipsed sky and the bright day sky can be seen most prominently in the direction opposite the Sun. Straight above, blue sky is normal sunlight reflecting off the atmosphere, while near the horizon the clear sky can appear more orange or red. In the Belt of Venus, the atmosphere reflects more light from the setting (or rising) Sun and so appears more red. Featured here, the Belt of Venus was photographed over several Himalayan mountains including, second from the right, Mount Everest, the tallest mountain on Earth. Although usually not mentioned, the belt is frequently caught by accident in other photographs.

© Soumyadeep Mukherjee — used with the credit NASA publishes

Light Echoes from V838 Mon

2022

Light Echoes from V838 Mon

What caused this outburst of V838 Mon? For reasons unknown, star V838 Mon's outer surface suddenly greatly expanded with the result that it became one of the brighter stars in the Milky Way Galaxy in early 2002. Then, just as suddenly, it shrunk and faded. A stellar flash like this had never been seen before -- supernovas and novas expel matter out into space. Although the V838 Mon flash appears to expel material into space, what is seen in the featured image from the Hubble Space Telescope is actually an outwardly expanding light echo of the original flash. In a light echo, light from the flash is reflected by successively more distant surfaces in the complex array of ambient interstellar dust that already surrounded the star. V838 Mon lies about 20,000 light years away toward the constellation of the unicorn (Monoceros), while the light echo above spans about six light years in diameter.

NASA · public domain

Pixels in the Sun

2021

Pixels in the Sun

These two panels, composed of video frames made with a safe solar telescope and hydrogen alpha filter, show remarkably sharp details on the solar disk and giant prominences along the Sun's edge on June 6 (top) and June 18. Taken from Beijing, China, they also show a transit of the International Space Station and China's new Tiangong Space Station in silhouette against the bright Sun. The International Space Station is near center in the bottom panel, crossing the solar disk left of bright active region AR2833 and below a large looping solar filament. China's space station is below solar active region AR2827 and right of center in the top panel, seen as a smaller, combined "+" and "-" shape. The pictures of the transiting orbital outposts were taken with the same equipment and at the same pixel scale, with the International Space Station some 492 kilometers away. China's space station was over 400 kilometers from the camera.

© Wang Letian — used with the credit NASA publishes

What happened on June 26

  1. 1974

    The Universal Product Code is scanned for the first time to sell a package of Wrigley's chewing gum at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio.

    Universal Product Code ↗

Every launch on June 26

23 launches

ONLINE
  1. 2026Electron | Ten Owl Of Ten (StriX Launch 10)RLSUCCESS
  2. 2025Electron | Get The Hawk Outta Here (4x HawkEye 360)RLSUCCESS
  3. 2022Black Brant IX | XQCELASUCCESS
  4. 2015Long March 4B | Gaofen 8CASCSUCCESS
  5. 2012SpaceShipTwo | VSS Enterprise GF17VGSUCCESS
  6. 2010Ariane 5 ECA | ArabSat-5A & COMS-1 (Chollian)ASASUCCESS
  7. 2008Proton | US-KMO 7KhSCSUCCESS
  8. 2003Pegasus XL | OrbView-3OSCSUCCESS
  9. 2002Soyuz U | Progress M-46RFSASUCCESS
  10. 1993Delta II | GPS IIA-12USAFSUCCESS
  11. 1985Soyuz U | Zenit-8 17CCCPSUCCESS
  12. 1984Soyuz U | Yantar-4K2 8CCCPSUCCESS
  13. 1980Soyuz U | Zenit-6U 21CCCPSUCCESS
  14. 1976Titan IIIC | DSP 6USAFSUCCESS
  15. 1974Kosmos 11K63 | DS-P1-I 15CCCPSUCCESS
  16. 1973Titan 24B | KH-8 39USAFFAILURE
  17. 1972Soyuz | Kosmos 496CCCPSUCCESS
  18. 1971N1 | Soyuz 7K-LOK No.1CCCPFAILURE
  19. 1970Voskhod | Zenit-2M 9CCCPSUCCESS
  20. 1970Molniya-M | Molniya-1 14CCCPSUCCESS
  21. 1968Voskhod | Zenit-4 43CCCPSUCCESS
  22. 1967Kosmos-3M | Tselina-O-GVMCCCPFAILURE
  23. 1958Vanguard | VanguardUSNFAILURE

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. 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.

FIELD KIT / LIBRARY

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