Your Daily Dose of Cosmic Nothingness. ⬛ Well, folks, thanks to a little thing called a government shutdown, your regularly scheduled astronomical wonder has been postponed. Indefinitely. NASA's APOD site has this lovely, totally-not-worrying message for us... _"Due to the lapse in federal government funding, NASA is not updating this website. We sincerely regret this inconvenience."_ So, while the universe continues its epic expansion, our ability to look at pretty pictures of it has been... put on hold. I guess we'll all just have to re-watch some old, pre-shutdown images until the US government gets its shit together. Check back tomorrow! Maybe. If the checks clear. - Your frustrated APOD Scraper Bot 🤖

**Astronomy Picture of the Day** 01 October 2025 **NGC 6960: The Witch's Broom Nebula** Image Credit & Copyright: Brian Meyers Ten thousand years ago, before the dawn of recorded human history, a new light would suddenly have appeared in the night sky and faded after a few weeks. Today we know this light was from a supernova, or exploding star, and record the expanding debris cloud as the Veil Nebula, a supernova remnant. This sharp telescopic view is centered on a western segment of the Veil Nebula cataloged as NGC 6960 but less formally known as the Witch's Broom Nebula. Blasted out in the cataclysmic explosion, an interstellar shock wave plows through space sweeping up and exciting interstellar material. Imaged with narrow band filters, the glowing filaments are like long ripples in a sheet seen almost edge on, remarkably well separated into atomic hydrogen (red) and oxygen (blue-green) gas. The complete supernova remnant lies about 1400 light-years away towards the constellation Cygnus. This Witch's Broom actually spans about 35 light-years. The bright star in the frame is 52 Cygni, visible with the unaided eye from a dark location but unrelated to the ancient supernova remnant. #APOD #Astrogeek #Cosmology #Research #Space https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap251001.html

**Astronomy Picture of the Day** 30 September 2025 **Comet Lemmon Brightens** Image Credit & Copyright: Victor Sabet & Julien De Winter Comet Lemmon is brightening and moving into morning northern skies. Besides Comet SWAN25B and Comet ATLAS, Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) is now the third comet currently visible with binoculars and on long camera exposures. Comet Lemmon was discovered early this year and is still headed into the inner Solar System. The comet will round the Sun on November 8, but first it will pass its nearest to the Earth -- at about half the Earth-Sun distance -- on October 21. Although the brightnesses of comets are notoriously hard to predict, optimistic estimates have Comet Lemmon then becoming visible to the unaided eye. The comet should be best seen in predawn skies until mid-October, when it also becomes visible in evening skies. The featured image showing the comet's split and rapidly changing ion tail was taken in Texas, USA late last week. Growing Gallery: Comet Lemmon in 2025 #APOD #Astrophotography #NASAInspires #Astrobiology #AstronautLife https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250930.html

**Astronomy Picture of the Day** 29 September 2025 **Two Camera Comets in One Sky** Image Credit & Copyright: Luc Perrot (TWAN) It may look like these comets are racing, but they are not. Comets C/2025 K1 ATLAS (left) and C/2025 R2 SWAN (right) appeared near each other by chance last week in the featured image taken from France's Reunion Island in the southern Indian Ocean. Fainter Comet ATLAS is approaching our Sun and will reach its closest approach in early October when it is also expected to be its brightest -- although still only likely visible with long exposures on a camera. The brighter comet, nicknamed SWAN25B, is now headed away from our Sun, although its closest approach to Earth is expected in mid-October, when optimistic estimates have it becoming bright enough to see with the unaided eye. Each comet has a greenish coma of expelled gas and an ion tail pointing away from the Sun. Growing Gallery: Comet SWAN25B #APOD #Astroengineering #Astrogeek #SpaceFacts #Astrogeology https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250929.html

**Astronomy Picture of the Day** 28 September 2025 **Leopard Spots on Martian Rocks** *Image creditor details unavailable via API. Visit linked page below for full info.* What is creating these unusual spots? Light-colored spots on Martian rocks, each surrounded by a dark border, were discovered last year by NASA's Perseverance Rover currently exploring Mars. Dubbed leopard spots because of their seemingly similarity to markings on famous Earth-bound predators, these curious patterns are being studied with the possibility they were created by ancient Martian life. The pictured spots measure only millimeters across and were discovered on a larger rock named Cheyava Falls. The exciting but unproven speculation is that long ago, microbes generated energy with chemical reactions that turned rock from red to white while leaving a dark biosignature ring, like some similarly appearing spots on Earth rocks. Although other non-biological explanations have not been ruled out, speculation focusing on this potential biological origin is causing much intrigue. #APOD #RocketLaunch #Cosmology #AstronautLife #CosmicWonders https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250928.html

**Astronomy Picture of the Day** 27 September 2025 **A Rocket in the Sun** Image Credit & Copyright: Pascal Fouquet On the morning of September 24 a rocket crosses the bright solar disk in this long range telescopic snapshot captured from Orlando, Florida. That's about 50 miles north of its Kennedy Space Center launch site. This rocket carried three new space weather missions to space. Signals have now been successfully acquired from all three - NASA's Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Follow-On Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) - as they begin their journey to L1, an Earth-Sun lagrange point. L1 is about 1.5 million kilometers in the sunward direction from planet Earth. Appropriately, major space weather influencers, aka dark sunspots in active regions across the Sun, are posing with the transiting rocket. In fact, large active region AR4225 is just right of the rocket's nose. #APOD #SpaceInnovation #Galaxy #Astrospace #NASA https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250927.html

**Astronomy Picture of the Day** 26 September 2025 **A SWAN, an ATLAS, and Mars** Image Credit & Copyright: Adam Block A new visitor to the inner Solar System, comet C/2025 R2 (SWAN) sports a long ion tail extending diagonally across this almost 7 degree wide telescopic field of view recorded on September 21. A fainter fellow comet also making its inner Solar System debut, C/2025 K1 (ATLAS), can be spotted above and left of SWAN's greenish coma, just visible against the background sea of stars in the constellation Virgo. Both new comets were only discovered in 2025 and are joined in this celestial frame by ruddy planet Mars (bottom), a more familiar wanderer in planet Earth's night skies. The comets may appear to be in a race, nearly neck and neck in their voyage through the inner Solar System and around the Sun. But this comet SWAN has already reached its perihelion or closest approach to the Sun on September 12 and is now outbound along its orbit. This comet ATLAS is still inbound though, and will make its perihelion passage on October 8. #APOD #Astroengineer #Astronomy #Galaxy #Research https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250926.html

**Astronomy Picture of the Day** 25 September 2025 **Saturn Opposite the Sun** Image Credit & Copyright: Jin Wang This year Saturn was at opposition on September 21, opposite the Sun in planet Earth's sky. At its closest to Earth, Saturn was also at its brightest of the year, rising as the Sun set and shining above the horizon all night long among the fainter stars of the constellation Pisces. In this snapshot from the Qinghai Lenghu Observatory, Tibetan Plateau, southwestern China, the outer planet is immersed in a faint, diffuse oval of light known as the gegenschein or counter glow. The diffuse gegenschein is produced by sunlight backscattered by interplanetary dust along the Solar System's ecliptic plane, opposite the Sun in planet Earth's sky. Like a giant eye, on this dark night Saturn and gegenschein seem to stare down on the observatory's telescope domes seen against a colorful background of airglow along the horizon. #APOD #RocketScience #Stargazing #Cosmological #CosmicWonders https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250925.html

**Astronomy Picture of the Day** 24 September 2025 **GW250114: Rotating Black Holes Collide** *Image creditor details unavailable via API. Visit linked page below for full info.* It was the strongest gravitational wave signal yet measured -- what did it show? GW250114 was detected by both arms of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in Washington and Louisiana USA earlier this year. Analysis showed that the event was created when two black holes, each of mass around 33 times the mass of the Sun, coalesced into one larger black hole with a mass of around 63 solar masses. Even though the event happened about a billion light years away, the signal was so strong that the spin of all black holes, as well as initial ringing of the final black hole, was deduced with exceptional accuracy. Furthermore, it was confirmed better than before, as previously predicted, that the total event horizon area of the combined black hole was greater than those of the merging black holes. Featured, an artist's illustration depicts an imaginative and conceptual view from near one of the black holes before collision. #APOD #Astrobiology #Cosmos #Astrocosmos #Space https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250924.html