NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day entry for August 12, 2026, featured an image from the 2024 Perseid meteor shower, projected as a small-planet view with the Bieszczady Mountains in Poland. The sky shows the Milky Way's arch, several red nebulas and over a hundred meteors pointing toward the radiant. The image is credited to Marcin Rosadziński, with the page edited by Cecilia Chirenti, Jerry Bonnell, Robert Nemiroff and Keighley Rockcliffe.

The page said the 2026 Perseid shower was expected to peak that night, with as many as 50-100 meteors per hour as Earth crossed debris left by Comet Swift-Tuttle. It attributed the expected stronger display to the peak coinciding with a new moon. The best viewing was typically between midnight and pre-dawn, with no binoculars needed, though a lawn chair and a dark-sky location would help.

The page also pointed to an August 12 total solar eclipse stream and described the following day's image as a total solar eclipse over Spain.