Fashions News

This Hubble Space Telescope snapshot of the Whirlpool Galaxy is among the imagery available via Googel Sky, a free planetarium program that debuted Aug. 22. Astronomers hope the software will do for sky imagery what Google Earth has done for mapping

This Feb. 5 image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows the diverse collection of galaxies in the cluster Abell S0740, more then 450 million light-years away. The giant elliptical ESO 325-G004 looms large at the cluster's center. The galaxy is as massive as 100 billion of our suns.

Previously unseen details of a complex structure within in the Carnia Nebula are revealed in this image, obtained with NASA's Hubble Telescope and released April 24 to mark the 17th anniversary of Hubble's launch. The Carina Nebula also contains other stars, each about 10 times as hot and 100 times as massive as the sun.

Saturn casts a deep show onto its rings in this composite image taken by the Cassini spacecraft Jan. 19. The view is a mosaic of 36 images - 12 separate sets of red, green and blue pictures taken over 2.5 hours.

Tourists admire a greenish auroral display as it glows in the sky Sept. 2, near the Greenland town of Kangerlussuaq. The northern lights are a popular tourist attraction in Greenland.

An image from NASA's STEREO probes shows solar plasma shimmyingand arcing above the edge of the sun on May 9-10. A large sunspot was just rotating to the edge of the sun when STEREO took its snapshot.

This image, taken by the Cassini spacecraft and provided by NASA on Oct. 9, shows the first high-resolution glimpse of the bright trailing hemisphere of Saturn's monn lapetus. The most prominent topographic feature in this view, in the bottom half of the mosaic, is a 280-mile-wide impact basin.

Carbon dioxide ore water frost appears to coat the tops of these sand dunes in Proctor Crater, located in Mars' southern hemisphere. The photo was taken during the Red Planet's southern winter and was released Feb. 7.

This June 26 image shows light-colored tracks left by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity as it traveled along the rim of Victoria Crater. The aging rove is exploring the deep impact crater in an attempts to peer farther back than ever before into the geologic history of the Red Planet.

Earth sets over the moon's horizon in this image, taken Nov. 7 by an HDTV video camera onboard Japan's Kaguya lunar probe. Earth's South Pole is oriented up, and the Australian and Asian continents are visible.

The international space station is seen with Earth in the backdrop in this photo provided by NASA as the space shuttle Endeavour pulls away from the station Aug. 19. The lower portion of Italy is visible at left.

Astronaut Scott Parazynski looks over repair work on the international space station's damaged solar array on Nov. 3. It was one of the most difficult and dangerous repairs ever attempted in orbit, and Parazynski pulled it off in a single space walk.

Astronaut Clay Anderson turns his digital camera around toward his own helmet visor during an Aug. 15 space walk. He captured the reflected image of his hands holding the camera, with Earth in the background. The international space station can also be seen in the reflection.

A thin laser guide beam flashes out form one of the four 27-foot telescopes of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large telescope complex in Chile. The long-exposure image, distributed Aug. 2, highlights the Milky Way as well as the planet Jupiter and the bright stars Antares.

The blue area in this image indicates X-ray emission from a million-degree plasma cloud in the extended regions of the Orion Nebula, detected by Europe's XMM-Newton satellite. The background image was recorded by the Spitzer Space Telescope in the infrared and shows emissions form cool dust.