← Another date

Birthday · May 14, 2026

Messier Catalog at Uniform Scale

May 14, 2026

Another trip around the Sun. A whole sky of possibilities.

A little universe, just for you

Your date.
Ready to give.

Choose a greeting

Free PNG · 1080 × 1350 · No account needed

Image rights and credit requirements apply when sharing or reusing imagery.

Choose an image from another year

Your celebration date stays the same. Each image keeps its actual publication date.

Change the year

Selected image source ↗ APOD published May 14, 2026. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.

Behind the original result

Messier Catalog at Uniform Scale

Original APOD · May 14, 2026 ↗

Read the original APOD for the astronomer’s explanation and full image credits. Its text is preserved in the archive as published.

Read the archived explanation

What are some of the most interesting astronomical objects you can see in the night sky? Armed with a good pair of binoculars or a small telescope, if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you can look for the very popular objects in the Messier Catalog. Most of them, but not all, are also visible from the southern half of the Earth. The featured image shows all 110 objects in the catalog at uniform scale -- the same magnification. Charles Messier created the catalog in the 18th century. He was interested in comets, and his catalog was a list of known comet-like "objects to avoid" in the sky when observing or hunting for comets. The deep sky objects in the catalog include a supernova remnant (the Crab Nebula, M1), other galaxies (such as Andromeda, M31), nebulae (e.g. the Orion Nebula, M42, a star-forming region) and stellar clusters (such as the Pleiades, M45, a bright young open cluster).

Explore May 14 in other years · 31 APOD entries, 1996–2026

Updated · APOD entries through