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December 4 in spaceflight

29 orbital launches flew on December 4, the earliest of them in 1958, and 26 reached orbit. Wikipedia records 5 spaceflight and astronomy events on December 4. Below are the pictures NASA published on December 4 in 5 different years — each one taken or released on this exact date.

Launches

ON RECORD

29MISSIONS

26 of them reached orbit. The earliest was 1958, the most recent 2025.

Recorded events

IN THE RECORD

5ENTRIES

Spaceflight and astronomy entries from Wikipedia's record of this date, oldest first — from 963 onward.

Pictures from this date

PUBLISHED

5IMAGES

NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for December 4, one per year. Some are public domain and some belong to the photographer — each says which.

Published on December 4

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

Galaxies in the Furnace

2025

Galaxies in the Furnace

An example of violence on a cosmic scale, enormous elliptical galaxy NGC 1316 lies about 75 million light-years away toward Fornax, the southern constellation of the Furnace. Investigating the startling sight, astronomers suspect the giant galaxy of colliding with smaller neighbor NGC 1317 seen just right of the large galaxy's center, producing far flung star streams in loops and shells. Light from their close encounter would have reached Earth some 100 million years ago. In the sharp telescopic image, the central regions of NGC 1316 and NGC 1317 appear separated by over 100,000 light-years. Complex dust lanes visible within also indicate that NGC 1316 is itself the result of a merger of galaxies in the distant past. Found on the outskirts of the Fornax galaxy cluster, NGC 1316 is known as Fornax A. One of the visually brightest of the Fornax cluster galaxies it is one of the strongest and largest celestial radio sources with radio emission extending well beyond this one degree wide field-of-view.

© Simone Curzi — used with the credit NASA publishes

Driveway Analemma

2024

Driveway Analemma

Does the Sun return to the same spot on the sky every day?  No.  A more visual answer is an analemma, a composite of sky images taken at the same time and from the same place over a year.  At completion, you can see that the Sun makes a figure 8 on the sky. The featured unusual analemma does not, however, picture the Sun directly: it was created by looking in the opposite direction. All that was required was noting where the shadow of an edge of a house was in the driveway every clear day at the same time. Starting in March in Falcon, Colorado, USA, the photographer methodically marked the shadow's 1 pm location. In one frame you can even see the photographer himself. Although this analemma will be completed in 2025, you can start drawing your own driveway analemma -- using no fancy equipment -- as soon as today.

© Nick Wright — used with the credit NASA publishes

Plane Crossing Crescent Moon

2023

Plane Crossing Crescent Moon

No, the Moon is not a bow, and no, it did not shoot out a plane like an arrow. What is pictured is a chance superposition. The plane's contrail would normally appear white, but the large volume of air toward the rising Sun preferentially knocked away blue light, not only making the sky blue, but giving the reflected trail a bright red hue. Far in the distance, well behind the plane, the crescent Moon also appears slightly reddened. Captured early last month from Bolton, UK, the featured image was taken so soon after sunrise that the plane was sunlit from below, as was its contrail. Within minutes, unfortunately, the impromptu sky show ended. The plane moved out of sight. The Moon kept rising but became harder to see through a brightening sky. And the contrail gradually dispersed.

© Juned Patel — used with the credit NASA publishes

Video: Powers of Ten

2022

Video: Powers of Ten

How different does the universe look on very small scales? On very large scales? The most famous short science film of its generation gives breathtaking comparisons. That film, Powers of Ten, originally created in the 1960s, has been officially posted to YouTube and embedded here. From a picnic blanket near Chicago out past the Virgo Cluster of Galaxies, every ten seconds the film zooms out to show a square a factor of ten times larger on each side. The 9-minute video then reverses, zooming back in a factor of ten every two seconds and ends up inside a single proton. The Powers of Ten sequence is actually based on the book Cosmic View by Kees Boeke in 1957, as is a similar but mostly animated film Cosmic Zoom that was also created in the late 1960s. The changing perspectives are so enthralling and educational that sections have been recreated using more modern computerized techniques, including the first few minutes of the movie Contact. Ray and husband Charles Eames, the film's creators, were known as quite visionary spirits and even invented their own popular chair.

© Charles & Ray Eames (Eames Office) — used with the credit NASA publishes

Iridescent by Moonlight

2021

Iridescent by Moonlight

In this snapshot from November 18, the Full Moon was not far from Earth's shadow. In skies over Sicily the brightest lunar phase was eclipsed by passing clouds though. The full moonlight was dimmed and momentarily diffracted by small but similar sized water droplets near the edges of the high thin clouds. The resulting iridescence shines with colors like a lunar corona. On that night, the Full Moon was also seen close to the Pleiades star cluster appearing at the lower left of the iridescent cloud bank. The stars of the Seven Sisters were soon to share the sky with a darker, reddened lunar disk.

© Marcella Giulia Pace — used with the credit NASA publishes

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What happened on December 4

  1. 963

    The lay papal protonotary is elected pope and takes the name Leo VIII, being consecrated on 6 December after ordination.

    Protonotary apostolic ↗

  2. 1639

    Jeremiah Horrocks and William Crabtree made the first successful observation of a transit of Venus (example pictured) from Earth.

    Jeremiah Horrocks ↗

  3. 1943

    World War II: In Yugoslavia, resistance leader Marshal Josip Broz Tito proclaims a provisional democratic Yugoslav government in-exile.

    Kingdom of Yugoslavia ↗

  4. 1965

    Launch of Gemini 7 with crew members Frank Borman and Jim Lovell. The Gemini 7 spacecraft was the passive target for the first crewed space rendezvous performed by the crew of Gemini 6A.

    Gemini 7 ↗

  5. 1998

    The Unity Module, the second module of the International Space Station, is launched.

    Unity (ISS module) ↗

Every launch on December 4

29 launches

ONLINE
  1. 2025Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 11-25SpXSUCCESS
  2. 2024Soyuz 2.1b | Kosmos 2580 (Lotos-S1 #9)VKSSUCCESS
  3. 2024Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 6-70SpXSUCCESS
  4. 2024Kuaizhou 1A | Haishao-1EPSUCCESS
  5. 2023Ceres-1 | Tianyan-16 & Starpool-01AGESUCCESS
  6. 2023Mir (3 stage) | S-STEPADDSUCCESS
  7. 2023Long March 2C | MisrSat-2CASCSUCCESS
  8. 2018Ariane 5 ECA | GSAT-11 & GEO-KOMPSAT-2AASASUCCESS
  9. 1999Pegasus XL HAPS | Orbcomm-D2 - D8OSCSUCCESS
  10. 1998Space Shuttle Endeavour / OV-105 | STS-88USASUCCESS
  11. 1996Delta II | Mars PathfinderUSAFSUCCESS
  12. 1990Soyuz U | Yantar-4K2 56CCCPSUCCESS
  13. 1990Tsiklon-2 | US-P 36CCCPSUCCESS
  14. 1986Soyuz U | Zenit-8 41CCCPSUCCESS
  15. 1984Titan 34D | KH-11 6USAFSUCCESS
  16. 1981Soyuz U | Zenit-6U 51CCCPSUCCESS
  17. 1977Soyuz U | Zenit-4MKM 7CCCPSUCCESS
  18. 1975Titan IIID | KH-9 11USAFSUCCESS
  19. 1973Kosmos-3M | Strela-2M 8CCCPSUCCESS
  20. 1971Atlas SLV-3A Agena D | Canyon 4USAFFAILURE
  21. 1969Thorad SLV-2H Agena D | KH-4B 8USAFSUCCESS
  22. 1968Titan IIIB | KH-8 18USAFSUCCESS
  23. 1965Titan II GLV | Gemini VIINASASUCCESS
  24. 1964Atlas SLV-3 Agena D | KH-7 14USAFSUCCESS
  25. 1962Thor Agena D | KH-4 16USAFSUCCESS
  26. 1961Blue Scout Jr | Blue Scout Jr. O-2USAFSUCCESS
  27. 1960Scout X-1 | NASA S-56NASAFAILURE
  28. 1959Little Joe | LJ-2NASASUCCESS
  29. 1958Vostok-L 8K72 | Luna-1cCCCPFAILURE

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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