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December 2 in spaceflight
Wikipedia records 4 spaceflight and astronomy events on December 2. Below are the pictures NASA published on December 2 in 5 different years — each one taken or released on this exact date.
Recorded events
IN THE RECORD4ENTRIES
Spaceflight and astronomy entries from Wikipedia's record of this date, oldest first — from 1988 onward.
Pictures from this date
PUBLISHED5IMAGES
NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for December 2, one per year. Some are public domain and some belong to the photographer — each says which.
Published on December 2
NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, for this calendar date in each of the last several years.
2025
M77: Spiral Galaxy with an Active Center
What's happening in the center of nearby spiral galaxy M77? The face-on galaxy lies a mere 47 million light-years away toward the constellation of the Sea Monster (Cetus). At that estimated distance, this gorgeous island universe is about 100 thousand light-years across. Also known as NGC 1068, its compact and very bright core is well studied by astronomers exploring the mysteries of supermassive black holes in active Seyfert galaxies. M77's active core glows bright at x-ray, ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and radio wavelengths. The featured sharp image of M77 was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The image shows details of the spiral's winding spiral arms as traced by obscuring red dust clouds and blue star clusters, all circling the galaxy's bright white luminous center. Free APOD Lecture in Phoenix: Wednesday, December 10 at 7 pm
NASA · public domain
2024
NGC 300: A Galaxy of Stars
This galaxy is unusual for how many stars it seems that you can see. Stars are so abundantly evident in this deep exposure of the spiral galaxy NGC 300 because so many of these stars are bright blue and grouped into resolvable bright star clusters. Additionally, NGC 300 is so clear because it is one of the closest spiral galaxies to Earth, as light takes only about 6 million years to get here. Of course, galaxies are composed of many more faint stars than bright, and even more of a galaxy's mass is attributed to unseen dark matter. NGC 300 spans nearly the same amount of sky as the full moon and is visible with a small telescope toward the southern constellation of the Sculptor. The featured image was captured in October from Rio Hurtado, Chile and is a composite of over 20 hours of exposure.
© Daniel Stern — used with the credit NASA publishes
2023
Startrails over Beijing Ancient Observatory
You can take a subway ride to visit this observatory in Beijing, China but you won't find any telescopes there. Starting in the 1400s astronomers erected devices at the Beijing Ancient Observatory site to enable them to accurately measure and track the positions of naked-eye stars and planets. Some of the large, ornate astronomical instruments are still standing. You can even see stars from the star observation platform today, but now only the very brightest celestial beacons are visible against the city lights. In this time series of exposures from a camera fixed to a tripod to record graceful arcing startrails, the brightest trail is actually the Moon. Its broad arc is seen behind the ancient observatory's brass armillary sphere. Compare this picture from the Beijing Ancient Observatory taken in September 2023 to one taken in 1895.
© Jeff Dai — used with the credit NASA publishes
2022
Merging Galaxy Pair IIZw096
Bright at infrared wavelengths, this merging galaxy pair is some 500 million light-years away toward the constellation Delphinus. The cosmic mashup is seen against a background of even more distant galaxies, and occasional spiky foreground stars. But the galaxy merger itself spans about 100,000 light-years in this deep James Webb Space Telescope image. The image data is from Webb's Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI). Their combined, sharp infrared view follows galactic scale restructuring in the dusty merger's wild jumble of intense star forming regions and distorted spiral arms
NASA · public domain
2021
NGC 6822: Barnard's Galaxy
Grand spiral galaxies often seem to get all the glory, flaunting their young, bright, blue star clusters in beautiful, symmetric spiral arms. But small galaxies form stars too, like nearby NGC 6822, also known as Barnard's Galaxy. Beyond the rich starfields in the constellation Sagittarius, NGC 6822 is a mere 1.5 million light-years away, a member of our Local Group of galaxies. A dwarf irregular galaxy similar to the Small Magellanic Cloud, NGC 6822 is about 7,000 light-years across. Brighter foreground stars in our Milky Way have a spiky appearance. Behind them, Barnard's Galaxy is seen to be filled with young blue stars and mottled with the telltale pinkish hydrogen glow of star forming regions in this deep color composite image.
© Dietmar Hager — used with the credit NASA publishes
What happened on December 2
1988
Space Shuttle Atlantis is launched on STS-27, a classified mission for the United States Department of Defense.
Space Shuttle Atlantis ↗
1990
Space Shuttle Columbia is launched on STS-35, carrying the ASTRO-1 spacelab observatory.
Space Shuttle Columbia ↗
1992
Space Shuttle Discovery is launched on STS-53 for the United States Department of Defense.
Space Shuttle Discovery ↗
1993
Space Shuttle program: STS-61: NASA launches the Space Shuttle Endeavour on a mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.
Space Shuttle program ↗
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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General-audience astronomy and spaceflight — none of it a textbook.
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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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