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November 19 in spaceflight

13 orbital launches flew on November 19, the earliest of them in 1965, and 13 reached orbit. Wikipedia records 8 spaceflight and astronomy events on November 19. Below are the pictures NASA published on November 19 in 5 different years — each one taken or released on this exact date.

Launches

ON RECORD

13MISSIONS

13 of them reached orbit. The earliest was 1965, the most recent 2025.

Recorded events

IN THE RECORD

8ENTRIES

Spaceflight and astronomy entries from Wikipedia's record of this date, oldest first — from 1881 onward.

Pictures from this date

PUBLISHED

5IMAGES

NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for November 19, one per year. Some are public domain and some belong to the photographer — each says which.

Published on November 19

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

Chamaeleon Dark Nebulas

2025

Chamaeleon Dark Nebulas

Sometimes the dark dust of interstellar space has an angular elegance. Such is the case toward the far-south constellation of Chamaeleon. Normally too faint to see, dark dust is best known for blocking visible light from stars and galaxies behind it. In this 11.4-hour exposure, however, the dust is seen mostly in light of its own, with its strong red and near-infrared colors creating a brown hue. Contrastingly blue, a bright star Beta Chamaeleontis is visible on the upper right of the V, with the dust that surrounds it preferentially reflecting blue light from its primarily blue-white color. All of the pictured stars and dust occur in our own Milky Way Galaxy with one notable exception: a white spot just below Beta Chamaeleontis is the galaxy IC 3104, which lies far in the distance. Interstellar dust is mostly created in the cool atmospheres of giant stars and dispersed into space by stellar light, stellar winds, and stellar explosions such as supernovas.

© Xinran Li & Houbo Zhao — used with the credit NASA publishes

Undulatus Clouds over Las Campanas Observatory

2024

Undulatus Clouds over Las Campanas Observatory

What's happening with these clouds? While it may seem that these long and thin clouds are pointing toward the top of a hill, and that maybe a world-famous observatory is located there, only part of that is true. In terms of clouds, the formation is a chance superposition of impressively periodic undulating air currents in Earth's lower atmosphere. Undulatus, a type of Asperitas cloud, form at the peaks where the air is cool enough to cause the condensation of opaque water droplets. The wide-angle nature of the panorama creates the illusion that the clouds converge over the hill. In terms of land, there really is a world-famous observatory at the top of that peak: the Carnegie Science's Las Campanas Observatory in the Atacama Desert of Chile. The two telescope domes visible are the 6.5-meter Magellan Telescopes. The featured coincidental vista was a surprise but was captured by the phone of a quick-thinking photographer in late September. Your Sky Surprise: What picture did APOD feature on your birthday? (post 1995)

© Yuri Beletsky — used with the credit NASA publishes

Space Station, Solar Prominences, Sun

2023

Space Station, Solar Prominences, Sun

That's no sunspot. It's the International Space Station (ISS) caught passing in front of the Sun. Sunspots, individually, have a dark central umbra, a lighter surrounding penumbra, and no Dragon capsules attached. By contrast, the ISS is a complex and multi-spired mechanism, one of the largest and most complicated spacecraft ever created by humanity. Also, sunspots circle the Sun, whereas the ISS orbits the Earth. Transiting the Sun is not very unusual for the ISS, which orbits the Earth about every 90 minutes, but getting one's location, timing and equipment just right for a great image is rare. The featured picture combined three images all taken in 2021 from the same location and at nearly the same time. One image -- overexposed -- captured the faint prominences seen across the top of the Sun, a second image -- underexposed -- captured the complex texture of the Sun's chromosphere, while the third image -- the hardest to get -- captured the space station as it shot across the Sun in a fraction of a second. Close inspection of the space station's silhouette even reveals a docked Dragon Crew capsule. Follow APOD on Instagram in: Arabic, English, Persian, Portuguese, and Taiwanese

© Mehmet Ergün — used with the credit NASA publishes

Artemis 1 Moonshot

2022

Artemis 1 Moonshot

When the Artemis 1 mission's Orion spacecraft makes its November 21 powered flyby of the Moon, denizens of planet Earth will see the Moon in a waning crescent phase. The spacecraft will approach to within about 130 kilometers of the lunar surface on its way to a distant retrograde orbit some 70,000 kilometers beyond the Moon. But the Moon was at last quarter for the November 16 launch and near the horizon in the dark early hours after midnight. It's captured here in skies over Kennedy Space Center along with the SLS rocket engines and solid rocket boosters lofting the uncrewed Orion to space. Ragged fringes appearing along the bright edge of the sunlit lunar nearside are caused as pressure waves generated by the rocket's passage change the index of refraction along the camera's line of sight.

© John Kraus — used with the credit NASA publishes

NGC 281: Starless with Stars

2021

NGC 281: Starless with Stars

In visible light the stars have been removed from this narrow-band image of NGC 281, a star forming region some 10,000 light-years away toward the constellation Cassiopeia. Stars were digitally added back to the resulting starless image though. But instead of using visible light image data, the stars were added with X-ray data (in purple) from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and infrared data (in red) from the Spitzer Space Telescope. The merged multiwavelength view reveals a multitude of stars in the region's embedded star cluster IC 1590. The young stars are normally hidden in visible light images by the natal cloud's gas and obscuring dust. Also known to backyard astro-imagers as the Pacman Nebula for its overall appearance in visible light, NGC 281 is about 80 light-years across.

© Wido Oerlemans — used with the credit NASA publishes

What happened on November 19

  1. 1881

    A meteorite lands near the village of Grossliebenthal, southwest of Odesa, Ukraine.

    Meteorite fall ↗

  2. 1942

    World War II: Soviet troops launched Operation Uranus at the Battle of Stalingrad with the goal of encircling Axis forces, turning the tide of the battle in their favour.

    World War II ↗

  3. 1942

    World War II: Battle of Stalingrad: Soviet Union forces under General Georgy Zhukov launch the Operation Uranus counterattacks at Stalingrad, turning the tide of the battle in the USSR's favor.

    Battle of Stalingrad ↗

  5. 1969

    Apollo program: Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean land at Oceanus Procellarum (the "Ocean of Storms") and become the third and fourth humans to walk on the Moon.

    Apollo program ↗

  6. 1996

    Space Shuttle program: Columbia is launched on STS-80, which would become the longest mission in the program at 17 days. On this mission, astronaut Story Musgrave becomes the only astronaut to fly on all five space shuttles.

    Space Shuttle program ↗

  7. 1997

    Space Shuttle Columbia is launched on STS-87.

    STS-87 ↗

  8. 1999

    Shenzhou 1: The People's Republic of China launches its first Shenzhou spacecraft.

    Shenzhou 1 ↗

Every launch on November 19

13 launches

ONLINE
  1. 2025Long March 2C | Shijian 30 A-CCASCSUCCESS
  2. 2025Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 6-94SpXSUCCESS
  3. 2024Starship | Integrated Flight Test 6SpXSUCCESS
  4. 2018Long March 2D | Shiyan 6, Jiading-1 (OKW-1) & othersCASCSUCCESS
  5. 2016Atlas V 541 | GOES-RULASUCCESS
  6. 1999Long March 2F | Shenzhou-1CASCSUCCESS
  7. 1997Space Shuttle Columbia / OV-102 | STS-87USASUCCESS
  8. 1996Soyuz U | Progress M-33RFSASUCCESS
  9. 1996Space Shuttle Columbia / OV-102 | STS-80USASUCCESS
  10. 1978Delta 2914 | NATO 3CUSAFSUCCESS
  11. 1971Voskhod | Zenit-4M 26CCCPSUCCESS
  12. 1966Vostok 8A92 | Zenit-2 43CCCPSUCCESS
  13. 1965Scout X-4 | Solrad 8NASASUCCESS

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.

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