See this year's most stunning space pictures
Published 15 Dec 2018, 09:04 GMT, Updated 26 Apr 2019, 11:43 BST
This glowing fog over Phoenix, Arizona, has a perfectly natural explanation: It's exhaust from a SpaceX rocket that launched from California.
Photograph by Mike OlbinskiFour orange lasers cut through the skies above Chile's Atacama desert, the home of ESO's Very Large Telescope. The lasers help measure atmospheric turbulence, which lets the telescope correctively adapt its optics and capture images as sharp as those taken from space.
Photograph by Gerhard HuedepohlClouds in Jupiter's northern hemisphere swirl in intricate patterns in this image from NASA's Juno spacecraft. To process the final picture, citizen scientist Kevin Gill carefully aligned Juno's raw images, which the spacecraft takes while rotating twice a minute.
Photograph by NASA, JPL Cal-tech, SwRI, Msss, Kevin M. GillInternational Space Station commander Alexander Gerst has a better view of our home planet than most, judging by this painterly scene of southern Africa's west coast. "Not many artists in this world are as creative as Mother Nature," he wrote in his social posts accompanying the image.
Photograph by ESA/NASA-A.GerstOfficially, this vivid collection of dust, gas, and bright young stars—seen here in a picture taken by the Very Large Telescope in Chile—is known as NGC 2467. But zoom out a bit, and this active star-forming region appears to be part of a grinning skull, earning it the nickname the Skull and Crossbones Nebula.
Photograph by EsoEarth's cosmic dance partner, the moon, peeks out above the blue fuzz of the atmosphere in this image taken from the International Space Station.
Photograph by NASAIndonesia's island of Java pops out like an electric jewel against the darkness of the Indian Ocean in this image taken from the International Space Station. Home to more than 141 million people, Java is Indonesia's geographic and economic heart, as well as the world's most populous island.
Photograph by NASAA lone photographer stands in Moab, Utah, silhouetted against a night sky that reveals the Andromeda galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy, and the moon.
Photograph by Brad GoldpaintAs the International Space Station orbited 256 miles above South Australia on October 7, 2018, a camera on board captured this celestial view of Earth's atmospheric glow set against the starry band of the Milky Way.
Photograph by NASA, JscNASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter peers down at the slopes of a mountain within Valles Marineris, the solar system's largest canyon system. Sand dunes ripple across the landscape, nudged on by the Martian wind.
Photograph by NASA, JPL Cal-tech, Univ. of ArizonaThe Cat's Paw Nebula, seen here in an image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, is a star-forming region that lies inside the Milky Way galaxy. New stars may heat up the surrounding gas, which can expand to form the bubbles that give the nebula its distinctive pattern.
Photograph by NASA, JPL Cal-techMade up of 20 separate pictures, this image shows the Milky Way galaxy against a field of radio telescopes in Ming’antu, China.
Photography by Tianhong LiThis image of the moon's surface reveals rarely seen details.
Photograph by Jordi Delpeix BorrellThis Hubble Space Telescope picture shows Messier 95, a spiral galaxy in the constellation Leo some 35 million light-years away. Discovered in 1781, the galaxy—which structurally resembles our Milky Way—is known to host supernovae, the massive explosions that end some large stars' lives.
Photograph by NASA, ESA Hubble Space TelescopePhotograph by Jaynie Bunnell
NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei captured this nighttime view of the southeastern U.S. from aboard the International Space Station, 250 miles above Earth's surface. The region's major urban areas glow orange, from Little Rock, Arkansas, (left) to the coasts of Florida (top right).
Photograph by NASA, Mark Vande HeiPhotograph by NASA, ESA Hubble Space Telescope
A cyclone at Jupiter's north pole is flanked by eight smaller vortices in this picture from NASA's Juno spacecraft. In infrared, the scene looks downright hellish, but the lavalike colours actually represent cold temperatures. Yellow clouds are a mere -13 degrees Celcius; the dark red clouds are -118 degrees.
Photograph by NASA, JPL Cal-tech, SwRI, Asi, Inaf, JIRAMSand accumulates into dunes on the floor of Mars's Lyot Crater in a picture taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This particular dune appears bright blue in enhanced colour because its grains differ in size and composition from the surrounding sediments.
Photo by NASA, JPL Cal-tech, Univ. of ArizonaMagnificent clouds swirl like ink in Jupiter's North-North Temperate Belt, seen here by NASA's Juno spacecraft. This view of Jupiter's atmosphere contains whitish clouds and a white oval, a type of anticyclonic storm that's a smaller cousin of Jupiter's Great Red Spot.
Photograph by NASA, JPL Cal-tech, SwRI, Msss, Gerald Eichstädt, Seán DoranAn aurora illuminates the sky over Alaska on November 4, 2018.
Photograph by Bradford Fenton