By Raza Mehdi
Nov 16, 2022
The STEREO spacecraft caught this spectacular prominence eruption as it blasted away, stretching almost halfway across the Sun about 500,000 miles. Prominences are loops of plasma that form on the Sun’s surface, induced by its magnetic forces.
Huge Eruption Seen on Sun
Image: NASA
This is a mosaic image of the Crab Nebula, a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star’s supernova explosion. William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, observed the nebula using a 36-inch telescope in 1844 and named it the Crab Nebula as his drawing resembled a crab.
The Crab Nebula
Image: NASA
This spectacular “blue marble” picture is the most detailed true-colour image of the entire Earth to date. Using a collection of satellite-based monitors, scientists and visualisers stitched together months of observations of the Earth's surface into a seamless, true-colour montage.
Planet Earth
Image: NASA
This image of Typhoon Nabi swirling in the Pacific Ocean and heading towards southern Korea and Japan was photographed by an Expedition 11 crewmember on September 3, 2005. "Nabi" means butterfly in Korean.
Typhoon Nabi
Image: NASA
Papua New Guinea’s Manam Volcano released a thin, faint plume on June 16, 2010, as clouds gathered at the volcano’s summit. Rills of brown rocks interrupted the carpet of green vegetation on the volcano’s slopes, while white clouds partially obscured NASA's satellite view of Manam.
Manam Volcano, Papua New Guinea
Image: NASA
Hubble Space Telescope captures auroras appearing on the poles of Jupiter. The vivid glows known as auroras are created when high-energy particles enter a planet’s atmosphere near its magnetic poles and collide with the gas atoms.
Auroras in Jupiter’s Atmosphere
Image: NASA
Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanically active entity in the solar system. Here we can see a red ring around the volcano Pele after dramatic changes in the area around Pillan Patera, another volcanic centre.
View of Jupiter’s Moon Io
Image: NASA
In this image, Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera displays the Tarantula Nebula star-forming region in a new light. It shows thousands of never-before-seen young stars previously shrouded in cosmic dust. The most active region appears to sparkle with massive young stars, appearing pale blue.
A Cosmic Tarantula
Image: NASA
The Antennae galaxies shown in this image are located about 62 million light-years from Earth. They derived their name from the long antenna-like “arms” seen in wide-angle views of the system. These features were produced by tidal forces generated in the collision.
Two Colliding Galaxies
Image: NASA
This is the last photo taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft before it ended its mission and crashed into Saturn. The blue dot that you can notice is Earth.
Earth as a Pale Blue Dot
Image: NASA
This composite image shows the Sun's atmosphere, the corona (as seen by the SOHO satellite) and a ground-based image of the August 21, 2017, solar eclipse in totality.
Solar Eclipse Composite Image
Image: NASA
Since August 2012, Curiosity has been exploring the Gale crater region on Mars. The rover has climbed more than 2,000 feet on Mt. Sharp in Gale Crater, reaching progressively younger rocks indicating how Mars has evolved from a wet, habitable planet to a cold desert environment.
Curiosity's Dusty Selfie
Image: NASA