Comet of the century
Comet McNaught flares in early-morning skies over the Chilean city of Pucon, 500
miles south of Santiago, on Jan. 19. The comet was visible to the naked eye in the
Northern Hemisphere during early January, but turned into a spectacular sight for
the Southern Hemisphere later in the month.
Rings of lightSaturn's backlit rings shine in this image,
taken by the Cassini spacecraft as the planet came between the sun and
the spacecraft. The shite box highlights our own planet, which appears
as a pale blue dot within the rings.
Light up the nightThe space shuttle Discovery streaks across the sky over Daytona Beach,
Fla., after its Dec. 9 liftoff from Kennedy Space Center, on a mission to the
international space station. The event was NASA's first nighttime space shuttle
launch in four years.
Getting to workDiscovery astronaut Christer Fuglesang, a mission specialist
from the European Space Agency, works outside the international space station.
Fuglesang and fellow astronaut Robert Curbeam reconfigured the space station's
power system during the second of four spacewalks for Discovery's mission.
StardustA photo from the Hubble Space Telescope shows newly formed,
bright blue stars that are blowing a cavity in the center of a star-forming
region known as N90. Because N90 is located far from the central body of the Small
Magellanic Cloud, numerous background galaxies in this picture can be seen, delivering a
grand backdrop for the stellar newcomers. The dust in the region gives these distant
galaxies a reddish-brown tint.
Martian vistaNASA's Opportunity captured this vista of Victoria Crater
from the viewpoint of Cape Verde, one of the outcrops that are part of the rim
of the Martian ccrater. Opportunity drove onto Cape Verde shortly after arriving
at the rim of Victoria in September 2006. The view combines hundreds of exposures
taken by the rover's panoramic camera.
Jupiter from a distanceThe New Horizons probe's Long Range Reconnaissance
Imager was 35.3 million miles (57 million kilometers) from Jupiter when it took
this picture. At right ate the moons Io (bottom) and Ganymede. Ganymede's shadow can be
seen on Jupiter's disk. New Horizons is on its way to a rendezvous with Pluto in 2015.
Laser lightA laser beam flashes from the Gemini North telescope
on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The "guide star" helps calibrate the telescope for
observations. The remains of evening twilight can be seen to the right, and the lightd of
Hilo to the left.
