How To Find The NASA Photo From Day Your Pet Passed Away

Here’s the short version, in case you don’t have room for much today. NASA has published one astronomy photograph nearly every day since June 16, 1995, along with a written explanation of what you’re looking at. That means there’s almost certainly a NASA photo from the day your pet passed away, and you can pull it up in about a minute. The archive is free, there’s no account to make, no email to hand over, and nobody asks you why you want it.

The fastest way is to build the web address yourself from the date. It’s apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap, then the two-digit year, month, and day, then .html. October 15, 2024 becomes apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap241015.html. Type it in, and you’re looking at the image from that day, with a paragraph from an astronomer explaining what it is. If you’d rather browse than type, NASA keeps a calendar of thumbnails going back to 1995.

People do this at all kinds of distances from the loss. Some the same week, some years later, some on an anniversary they didn’t see coming. There’s no window you’re supposed to be inside.

Key Takeaways

• NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day has run daily since June 16, 1995, so almost any date since then has an image attached.
• You can jump straight to a date by building the web address yourself: the format is apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap plus the two-digit year, month, and day, then .html.
• The “What Did Hubble See on Your Birthday?” tool is different. It takes a month and day but no year, so it shows you that calendar date across many years rather than one specific date.
• Many APOD images are copyrighted by the individual astrophotographers who took them, not by NASA. The credit line under each image tells you who owns it, which matters if you plan to print or publish it.
• If your date falls before June 1995, or the image that day leaves you cold, other dates carry meaning too: adoption day, birthday, the day you met, the last good day.

What the NASA Photo From the Day Your Pet Passed Away Actually Is

The archive everyone means here is NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, usually shortened to APOD. It works exactly the way it sounds. Every day, one image goes up, chosen and captioned by professional astronomers, with a short explanation of what the object is and why it’s interesting.

APOD has posted daily since June 16, 1995. The very first entry was called “Neutron Star Earth,” which tells you the register right away. Real astronomy, written for people who aren’t astronomers. Thirty-one years of that adds up to more than eleven thousand entries.

What you get on any given day is a single photograph or animation, a title, and a paragraph of explanation with the occasional link out to a related image. Some days, that’s a galaxy hundreds of millions of light years out. Other days it’s an aurora over a house in Norway. It might be a comet, a crater up close, or a diagram of a spacecraft’s orbit. The archive isn’t curated to be beautiful. It’s curated to be interesting, and those aren’t the same thing.

Which is the honest catch with this ritual. You might open your date and find something breathtaking. You might find a diagram of a spacecraft’s orbit. Neither one means anything about your pet, and we’ll come back to that.

How to Find the Photo in About a Minute

To find the NASA photo from the day your pet passed away, go to apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap, add the two-digit year, then the two-digit month, then the two-digit day, and finish with .html. For October 15, 2024, that’s apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap241015.html. If you’d rather not type an address, NASA’s calendar index covers every year from 1995 forward and shows each month as a grid of thumbnails.

Building the link to the NASA photo from the day your pet passed away

Two details trip people up. The year is two digits, so 2024 is 24. And every single-digit number takes a leading zero, so March is 03 and the third of the month is 03.

March 3, 2019 comes out as ap190303.html. Get those two details right and the page loads immediately.

Some pet parents find this part steadying, oddly. You’re doing something precise on a day when nothing else feels manageable.

The calendar, if you’d rather browse

NASA’s calendar index covering every year from 1995 to the present lets you pick a year, then a month, then click a thumbnail.

Browsing has one advantage the direct link doesn’t. You can see the days around your date at a glance. Some people end up choosing the image from the day before or the day after because it simply fits better. None of that counts as cheating. There’s also a plain text archive listing every entry by title if you’d rather read titles than look at pictures, which some people prefer when they’re not ready for surprises.

Scroll past the picture once the page loads. Astronomers write the explanation underneath and usually tell you what the object is, how far away it sits, and what’s happening in the frame. That paragraph is often what people keep, more than the picture.

What to Do If Your Date Isn’t in the Archive

If your pet passed away before June 16, 1995, there’s no APOD for that date. The project simply didn’t exist yet. That’s a hard stop, not a search problem, and it catches people off guard when they’re looking up a pet they lost decades ago. The Hubble tool in the next section is the better route in that case, because it works on month and day without needing the year to fall inside a particular window.

The softer version of this problem is more common. Your date is there, but the image does nothing for you. Maybe it’s a chart, maybe it’s a piece of hardware, or maybe it’s genuinely lovely, and you feel flat looking at it. Try the day before or the day after. Try the same calendar date in a different year. Or move to a different date entirely, using the list further down. The date only carries the weight you decide to give it.

And if the whole exercise lands badly, close the tab. Rituals aren’t assignments. Our guide to rituals that help people process pet loss covers other options if this one isn’t yours.

What Did Hubble See on That Day

NASA’s “What Did Hubble See on Your Birthday?” tool asks for a month and a day, with no year, then shows you what the Hubble Space Telescope observed on that calendar date at some point across its decades in orbit. The 2026 edition returns five images per date. It gets confused with APOD all the time, and that difference is the point.

So the Hubble tool answers a different question than APOD does. APOD tells you what was published on one specific day, the actual day. Hubble tells you what the telescope happened to be looking at on that calendar date across many years, which may be an image captured in a completely different year than the one you care about. For some pet parents, that’s more comforting, because it turns a single painful date into a date that recurs. For others it feels less precise and matters less. Neither reaction is the wrong one.

NASA notes one quirk directly. Hubble exposures sometimes run across more than one day, so an observation you’d expect on your date may sit on an adjacent one. If your date comes back thin, check the day on either side.

Other Dates Worth Looking Up

The day a pet died is rarely the day people most want to sit with, and every one of these dates has an APOD too:

• The day you brought them home, which for a lot of pet parents is the date that actually matters and arrives without the weight the death date carries.
• Their birthday, or your best guess at it. Rescue pets often come with an estimate, and an estimate works fine here.
• The day you met, which isn’t always the day you took them home: the shelter visit, the roadside, the friend’s litter.
• A good-news day. The scan that came back clear, the surgery they came through, the morning they got themselves up after weeks of not.
• The last good day. Not the last day. The last genuinely good one, the one you’d point to if someone asked when they were still themselves.

Something worth knowing before you go looking: The death date and the adoption date usually fall in different months, so people end up with two anniversaries rather than one, and they’re often surprised by which of the two hits harder. How anniversary grief works around remembrance dates goes deeper if you’re heading into one.

Check the Credit Line Before You Print Anything

It’s easy to assume everything on a NASA website is free to use however you like. That’s true of images NASA itself produced, which are generally in the public domain. That isn’t true of much of what appears on APOD. A large share of those images were taken by individual astrophotographers who retain the copyright, and NASA states it plainly. Some of the images are copyrighted, and neither NASA nor APOD can permit you to use them. Permission has to come from whoever holds the copyright.

Finding out who that is takes about five seconds. Look at the credit line printed under the image on the APOD page. It names the photographer or institution, and usually links to their site. A credit pointing to NASA or a NASA mission generally means it’s in the public domain. A credit naming a person means that person holds the rights. A credit naming another space agency usually means the image is free to use but still requires attribution, so read the line rather than assuming.

For a single print for your own wall, this is a practical non-issue. Copyright holders pursue commercial use, not a framed photo in a hallway. The line to watch is anything public. Selling something with the image on it, printing a run of memorial cards for a service, putting it on a fundraiser page. That’s when you write to the photographer. They’re usually reachable through the site their credit line links to, and a short email saying what the image is for and where it will appear is all that’s needed. Some say yes, some don’t answer, and either outcome is survivable.

Ways to Keep the Image Once You’ve Found It

A few practical things make the image last.

Save it at full size rather than screenshotting. On a computer, right-click the image and save it. On a phone, press and hold until the save option appears. Either way, tap or click the picture first, because on APOD the image itself links through to the full-resolution file, and that’s the version you want. Screenshots look fine on a phone and fall apart the moment anyone tries to print them.

Write down three things alongside it: the date, the title of the image, and the credit line. Those three details are what let you find it again in five years, and they’re what a print shop or framer will ask for. People remember the picture and forget the title almost every time. If you’re building a wider collection of things like this, preserving your pet’s memory after loss also means keeping it organized.

From there, what you do with it is yours. Some pet parents print it and frame it with a photo of their pet beside it. Some add it to a free online memorial page along with the story of the day. Some keep it as a phone background for a while and then don’t, which is also a complete answer. Our aftercare and pet memorial resources cover the wider range of ways people mark a loss.

If you’re framing it, one image can become two. NASA also publishes satellite photography of Earth in which coastlines, rivers, and lake shapes happen to resemble letters, and people use those to spell out a pet’s name to hang beside the date photo. Our guide to spelling your pet’s name with NASA satellite photos walks through picking the letters.

One note if you’re thinking about posting it publicly. A memorial on social media invites responses you can’t control, and some of them land badly on a hard day. Our guide to navigating pet loss on social media covers how to think about that before you post, not after.

What This Ritual Actually Does, and What It Doesn’t

Here’s our honest take, since you’ve read this far.

What the photograph does is give you a specific, findable, permanent object attached to a date that otherwise holds nothing you’d want to keep. Grief is largely made of dates with nothing in them. Putting something real into one is a small act of construction on a day when construction feels impossible.

It isn’t a sign. A galaxy was not marking the occasion, and the universe was not paying attention when your pet died. Any guide implying otherwise is wrong. But that’s not nothing, and the difference between those two things is worth holding onto.

People sometimes worry that wanting a ritual like this is silly, or that it’s a stretch. It isn’t a stretch. It’s the same instinct behind a headstone, a bench with a plaque, a song you won’t play anymore. You’re attaching the loss to something outside your own head so it has somewhere to live. That a NASA photograph happens to be free, beautiful, and dated is just a convenience.

And if you look it up and feel nothing, that’s information too, not failure. Some people need the date to stay empty for a while. You can always come back. The archive isn’t going anywhere, and neither is the date.

Baxter’s Photo from October 28, 2024

STEVE: A Glowing River over France

Credit & Copyright: Louis LEROUX-GÉRÉ

Explanation: Sometimes a river of hot gas flows over your head. In this case the river created a Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement (STEVE) that glowed bright red, white, and pink. Details of how STEVEs work remain a topic of research, but recent evidence holds that their glow results from a fast-moving river of hot ions flowing over a hundred kilometers up in the Earth’s atmosphere: the ionosphere. The more expansive dull red glow might be related to the flowing STEVE, but alternatively might be a Stable Auroral Red (SAR) arc, a more general heat-related glow. The featured picture, taken earlier this month in Côte d’Opale, France, is a wide-angle digital composite made as the STEVE arc formed nearly overhead. Although the apparition lasted only a few minutes, this was long enough for the quick-thinking astrophotographer to get in the picture. Can you find him?