Space missions, both crewed and robotic, have yielded amazing imagery and discoveries, ranging from seasonal features on Mars to stunning photos of our beautiful home planet, the cratered far side of the Moon, and even distant galaxies.
Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin
Monday, 27 October 2025
This sweeping view along a rusty red ridge and into a crater showcases the exquisite beauty of icy, layered terrain in the south polar region on Mars.
The High Resolution Stereo Imaging camera onboard ESA’s Mars Express captured this frosty scene in the Ultimi Scopuli region near the south pole of Mars on 19 May 2022. At this time, it was southern hemisphere spring, and ice was starting to retreat. Dark dunes began to peak through the frost, and the elevated terrain appears ice-free.
Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, Space Science Institute, CICLOPS, Mindaugas Macijauskas
Tuesday, 28 October 2025
Saturn is captured here by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Cassini orbited the gas giant for thirteen years before ending its mission by plunging into the planet's atmosphere on September 15, 2017. This image is a mosaic compiled from frames recorded by Cassini two days before its final dive.
Credit: NASA. Caption: M. Justin Wilkinson, Texas State University
Wednesday, 29 October 2025
An astronaut aboard the International Space Station photographed a sunset that looks like a vast sheet of flame. With Earth’s surface already in darkness, the setting sun, the cloud masses, and the sideways viewing angle make a powerful image of the kind that astronauts use to commemorate their flights.
Thin layers of lighter and darker blues reveal the many layers of the atmosphere. The lowest layer—the orange-brown line with clouds, dust, and smoke—is known to scientists as the troposphere, the layer of weather as we experience it. It is the smoke and dust particles in the atmosphere that give sunsets their strong red color.
Credit: NASA, J. English (U. Manitoba), S. Hunsberger, S. Zonak, J. Charlton, S. Gallagher (PSU), and L. Frattare (STScI)
Thursday, 30 October 2025
Called Seyfert's Sextet, this galactic vista was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in its 13th year. The galaxies are so tightly packed together that gravitational forces are beginning to rip stars from them and distort their shapes. Those same gravitational forces eventually could bring the galaxies together to form one large galaxy.
Seyfert's Sextet is not a very accurate nickname, though. Rather than six, only four galaxies are actually on the dance card. The small face-on spiral with the prominent arms (at center) is a background galaxy almost five times farther away than the other four. The sixth member of the sextet isn't a galaxy at all but a long "tidal tail" of stars (lower right) torn from one of the galaxies.
The group resides 190 million light-years away in the constellation Serpens. When the light we receive today left these galaxies, the dinosaurs ruled the Earth in the Middle Jurassic.
Credit: Apollo 11 crew / NASA.
Friday, 31 October 2025
This image of the crater Daedalus, with a diameter of about 80 kilometers, on the Moon's far side was taken by the Apollo 11 crew while in orbit around the Moon in 1969. The Moon’s far side is rugged and densely cratered, while the near side—the face that always looks toward Earth—is comparatively smooth. Because the Moon is tidally locked, humanity didn’t actually see the far side until the mid-20th century. Its bright highlands are much older than the dark, volcanic plains—or maria—that dominate the near side. Scientists think this contrast arose because the Moon’s crust is thinner on the near side, allowing ancient lava to flow more freely there.
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