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APOD: 2026 October 1 – Harvest Moon with Erupting Mount Etna
APOD
Astronomy Picture of the Day
Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
Harvest Moon with Erupting Mount Etna
Explanation: Have you ever seen the full moon rise? This colorful image was photographed last weekend in Sicily, just outside the town of Nicosia, in Italy. It is a composite photograph that shows the Moon rising as the sky turns darker. Lower clouds are reflecting the colors of antitwilight, while ash and gas from Mount Etna are seen higher in the background. The pink band lower in the sky is called the Belt of Venus. During a full moon, the Moon and the Sun are in opposition in the sky: the moon rises as the sun sets. The lunar phase cycle lasts approximately 29.5 days (but the Moon takes approximately 27 days to orbit the Earth). In some cultures of the Northern Hemisphere, the September full moon is called the Harvest Moon. Does your culture have a special name for it? (A full moon by any other name would shine as bright.)
APOD’s email for image submissions has changed. Please see: APOD Submissions
APOD’s main NASA site has moved : From apod.nasa.gov to science.nasa.gov/apod
Tomorrow’s picture: sharpless
| Date | October 1, 2026 |
|---|---|
| Credit & Copyright | Dario Giannobile |
| Authors & editors: | Cecilia Chirenti, Robert Nemiroff, Jerry Bonnell, Keighley Rockcliffe |
| A service of: |
ASD at NASA / GSFC, NASA Science Activation & Michigan Tech. U. |
An Agricultural “Island” in the Saskatchewan River Delta
Summer
autumn
Much of the Saskatchewan River Delta, a large inland delta that straddles the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, is too wet for extensive farming. But amid the delta’s winding channels, lakes, and marshes, an “island” of straight-edged fields breaks up the curvy contours. These fields, west of the town of The Pas, make up Manitoba’s northernmost agricultural area.
Known as the Carrot River Valley (Pasquia Area Settlement), the area lies within the Rural Municipality of Kelsey. Its actively farmed land spans more than 40,000 hectares (100,000 acres) between the Carrot and Pasquia rivers—tributaries of the Saskatchewan River—and is surrounded by wetlands, including the marshes of the Saskeram Wildlife Management Area to the north.
These images show the valley at two points during the 2026 growing season: on July 2 (left) and September 21 (right). They were acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on the NASA-USGS Landsat 9 and Landsat 8 satellites, respectively.
Landsat data feed into the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada annual crop inventory. The 2026 inventory was not released as of late September, but the 2025 map shows that farmers in the Carrot River Valley grew mostly canola and spring wheat that year, along with small patches of Canary seed.
The July 2026 image shows green crops across many of the valley’s fields. Planting in the area, part of Manitoba Agriculture’s Northwest crop reporting region, began later than in parts of the region to the south because of wet conditions. Still, fertile soils and long summer days at this northern latitude can help crops grow quickly.
By the time of the September image, the pattern had flipped. The Pas recorded little rainfall in the preceding week (1.6 millimeters, or 0.06 inches), while wetter weather elsewhere in the Northwest region (up to 43.9 millimeters, or 1.7 inches) held up the harvest. By then, farmers across the region had harvested about 10 percent of the canola and 50 percent of the spring wheat.
Managing water has long been a challenge in the valley. In the 1950s, a major flood control and drainage project got underway, and farming in the area today still depends on diking and pumping for agricultural flood protection.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
References & Resources
- Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (2025) Annual Crop Inventory. Accessed September 30, 2026.
- Jardine, T. D., et al. (2023) Healthy Delta, Healthy People: The Past, Present and Future of the Saskatchewan River Delta. In Wantzen, K. M. (Ed.), River Culture: Life as a Dance to the Rhythm of the Waters, 397–421. UNESCO Publishing.
- Kelsey Conservation District, Carrot–Saskatchewan River Integrated Watershed Management Plan: A Summary of Watershed Values (PDF). Accessed September 30, 2026.
- Manitoba Agriculture, Reward Versus Risk: Seeding Early In Manitoba. Accessed September 30, 2026.
- Rural Municipality of Kelsey, Elected Officials & General Information. Accessed September 30, 2026.
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Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
Sediment eroded from ice-capped mountains splays out across a broad river valley on Russia’s Severny Island.
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Curiosity Blog, Sols 5016–5021: Fantastic Minerals and How To Detect Them
3 min read
Curiosity Blog, Sols 5016–5021: Fantastic Minerals and How To Detect Them
Written by Lucy Lim, Planetary Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Earth planning date: Friday, Sept. 18, 2026
Curiosity surprised us at the beginning of the week with a change in rock texture — instead of the finely layered bedrock blocks we’ve been seeing in our recent sulfate unit workspaces, suddenly we were looking at blocks covered (and likely filled) with a jumble of small disc-shaped lumps. We’ve seen somewhat similar features before much earlier in the mission — for example, close to the Pahrump Hills back in the Murray mudstones, and they’re sometimes seen in Earth rocks as well, especially in settings in which minerals were precipitating from an evaporating fluid. The disc-like shapes could be created by the growth habits of a specific crystalline mineral that is known to grow into similar shapes, or they could be bits of a harder rock layer that broke up and collected here. We planned Mastcam and MAHLI imaging for more morphological detail on the jumbled disc blocks (“Yungay,” “Chiu Chiu”) as well as LIBS (“Puya Raimondii,” “Liolaemus Tacnae,” “Pisqu Warkatana”) and APXS (“Salar de Vacas”) to investigate their composition.
Ongoing long-distance imaging projects were furthered by ChemCam long-distance remote imager (RMI) and Mastcam mosaics of the buttes on either side of Valle Grande. These “cutaway”-view images of the strata above the rover will help us map sedimentary structures in these upcoming units and understand how these rocks formed and eroded. Views of more recent erosional deposits will also help us to understand the formation of Valle Grande itself.
In order to identify minerals, Curiosity needs data from the CheMin X-ray diffraction instrument, which means a drill campaign. We’ve driven over a kilometer since our last drill site at Campo Marte, and this will be our first drill above the erosional supersurface. The Wednesday plan’s drive brought us up next to a promising drill workspace a little beyond where we saw the disc-shaped features discussed above (imaged as “Torres del Paine” by Mastcam) and Friday’s planning included site characterization with the instruments on Curiosity’s arm (“Alberta Wild Rose,” “Moonraker Mountain”), ChemCam LIBS (“Osoyoos”), and Mastcam (“Trincomali Channel,” “Yellow Lady’s Slipper”). The team also selected a specific drill target and planned a very short drive to bring it in range of the arm — first for contact science and then, if all goes well, for the preload test and drill.
I’ll be back on planning on Monday as Geology and Mineralogy Science Theme Lead for Drill Sol 1 (Triage Contact Science) and we’ll see how things go from there!
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Help Overlap Zoo Reveal Cosmic Dust
Galaxies, vast collections of billions of stars, gas, and dust held together by gravity, are scattered across the immensity of space. But every so often, a coincidence occurs: Two galaxies line up from our point of view on Earth (or from a space telescope) and appear to overlap in the sky. These rare overlapping galaxies give astronomers a chance to study something normally difficult to see: the dust inside one of these distant cosmic objects. That’s the focus of NASA’s new Overlap Zoo project.
Picture the background galaxy acting like a cosmic flashlight, shining through the nearer galaxy. The backlit dust creates dark silhouettes, like shadows on a screen. By studying these silhouettes, astronomers can map how dust is distributed throughout galaxies and learn how it blocks, scatters, and dims starlight traveling through space. Measurements of how dust impacts light can even help astronomers refine estimates of the distances to faraway objects.
However, before we can study galaxy pairs and their dust, we first need to find them! Overlap Zoo is asking for your help with the search.
“As new and better observations of galaxies continue to multiply, it is becoming incredibly difficult for astronomers to classify every candidate galaxy pair,” said Trevor Butrum, Overlap Zoo project lead and graduate student. “Your help is invaluable to creating the biggest and cleanest catalog of overlapping galaxy pairs for further analysis.”
As a volunteer in Overlap Zoo, you’ll view images that volunteers in the Galaxy Zoo project have identified as containing possible overlapping galaxies. The Overlap Zoo project will teach you how to verify the presence of galaxy pairs in these images, classify key features of each galaxy, and mark their outlines. You’ll learn as you go, classifying as many of these images as you like. Your contributions will help build the first large-scale catalog of galaxy pairs suitable for dust studies and enable a huge step forward in accuracy of astronomical estimates.
Head over to Overlap Zoo and start classifying galaxies today. No prior experience needed – just curiosity and a few minutes of your time. Your observations will help unlock the secrets hidden in these rare cosmic alignments!
