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August 1 in spaceflight
Wikipedia records 2 spaceflight and astronomy events on August 1. Below are the pictures NASA published on August 1 in 6 different years — each one taken or released on this exact date.
Recorded events
IN THE RECORD2ENTRIES
Spaceflight and astronomy entries from Wikipedia's record of this date, oldest first — from 1911 onward.
Pictures from this date
PUBLISHED6IMAGES
NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for August 1, one per year. Some are public domain and some belong to the photographer — each says which.
Published on August 1
NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, for this calendar date in each of the last several years.
2026
Buck Moon and Belt of Venus
The Buck Moon is a traditional name for the full moon of July. In this colorful Adriatic sea and skyscape captured on July 28 from Krk Island along the coast of Croatia, a full Buck Moon is just rising over distant mountains. Since a full moon rises as the Sun sets, Earth's shadow also rises in the twilight scene, a diffuse gray band extending above the mountainous southeastern horizon. Above Earth's shadow band is the pinkish antitwilight arch. That subtly tinted band of backscattered sunlight is more widely known as the Belt of Venus. As it shares the eastern horizon with the atmospheric shadow of Earth and Belt of Venus, this full Buck Moon seems to set the stage for the New Moon to come. The New Moon of August 12 will cast its shadow on planet Earth in a much anticipated total solar eclipse.
© Branko Nadj — used with the credit NASA publishes
2025
Small Dark Nebula
A small, dark, nebula looks isolated near the center of this telescopic close-up. The wedge-shaped cosmic cloudlet lies within a relatively crowded region of space though. About 7,000 light-years distant and filled with glowing gas and an embedded cluster of young stars, the region is known as M16 or the Eagle Nebula. Hubble's iconic images of the Eagle Nebula include the famous star-forming Pillars of Creation, towering structures of interstellar gas and dust 4 to 5 light-years long. But this small dark nebula, known to some as a Bok globule, is a fraction of a light-year across. The Bok globule stands out in silhouette against the expansive background of M16's diffuse glow. Found scattered within emission nebulae and star clusters, Bok globules are small interstellar clouds of cold molecular gas and obscuring dust that also form stars within their dense, collapsing cores.
© Peter Bresseler — used with the credit NASA publishes
2024
Comet Olbers over Kunetice Castle
A visitor to the inner solar system every 70 years or so, Comet 13P/Olbers reached its most recent perihelion, or closest approach to the Sun, on June 30. Now on a return voyage to the distant Oort Cloud, the Halley-type comet is recorded here sweeping through northern summer night skies over historic Kunetice Castle, Czech Republic. The composite of tracked exposures for comet and sky, showing the comet's broad dust tail, brighter coma, and long ion tail buffeted by storms and winds from the Sun, and fixed exposures for foreground landscape was recorded on July 28. The comet is about 16 light-minutes beyond the castle and seen against faint background stars below the northern constellation Ursa Major. The hilltop castle dates to the 15th century, while Heinrich Olbers discovered the comet in 1815. Captured here low in northwestern skies just after sunset Comet Olbers, for now, offers skywatchers on planet Earth rewarding telescopic and binocular views. Comet 13P/Olbers' next perihelion passage will be in 2094.
© Petr Horálek — used with the credit NASA publishes
2023
Monster Solar Prominence
The monsters that live on the Sun are not like us. They are larger than the Earth and made of gas hotter than in any teapot. They have no eyes, but at times, many tentacles. They float. Usually, they slowly change shape and just fade back onto the Sun over about a month. Sometimes, though, they suddenly explode and unleash energetic particles into the Solar System that can attack the Earth. Pictured is a huge solar prominence imaged almost two weeks ago in the light of hydrogen. Captured by a small telescope in Gilbert, Arizona, USA, the monsteresque plume of gas was held aloft by the ever-present but ever-changing magnetic field near the surface of the Sun. Our active Sun continues to show an unusually high number of prominences, filaments, sunspots, and large active regions as solar maximum approaches in 2025.
© Mike Wenz — used with the credit NASA publishes
2022
Mountains of Dust in the Carina Nebula
It's stars versus dust in the Carina Nebula and the stars are winning. More precisely, the energetic light and winds from massive newly formed stars are evaporating and dispersing the dusty stellar nurseries in which they formed. Located in the Carina Nebula and known informally as Mystic Mountain, these pillar's appearance is dominated by the dark dust even though it is composed mostly of clear hydrogen gas. Dust pillars such as these are actually much thinner than air and only appear as mountains due to relatively small amounts of opaque interstellar dust. About 7,500 light-years distant, the featured image was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope and highlights an interior region of Carina which spans about three light years. Within a few million years, the stars will likely win out completely and the entire dust mountain will evaporate.
NASA · public domain
2021
Pluto in Enhanced Color
Pluto is more colorful than we can see. Color data and high-resolution images of our Solar System's most famous dwarf planet, taken by the robotic New Horizons spacecraft during its flyby in 2015 July, have been digitally combined to give an enhanced-color view of this ancient world sporting an unexpectedly young surface. The featured enhanced color image is not only esthetically pretty but scientifically useful, making surface regions of differing chemical composition visually distinct. For example, the light-colored heart-shaped Tombaugh Regio on the lower right is clearly shown here to be divisible into two regions that are geologically different, with the leftmost lobe Sputnik Planitia also appearing unusually smooth. After Pluto, New Horizons continued on, shooting past asteroid Arrokoth in 2019 and has enough speed to escape our Solar System completely. Pluto-Related Images with Brief Explanations: APOD Pluto Search
NASA · public domain
What happened on August 1
1911
Harriet Quimby became the first woman to earn an Aero Club of America aviator certificate.
Harriet Quimby ↗1911
Harriet Quimby takes her pilot's test and becomes the first U.S. woman to earn an Aero Club of America aviator's certificate.
Harriet Quimby ↗
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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