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The familiar eyeball shape of the Helix Nebula shows only two dimensions of this complex celestial body. But new observations suggest it may actually be composed of two gaseous disks nearly perpendicular to each other.

This false-color infrared image captured by the Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Henize 206 Nebula, a massive cloud of gas and dust in which hundreds and possibly thousands of new stars have formed over the last ten million years. The nebula, located just outside the Milky Way in a galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud, offers astrophysicists a celestial ringside seat on the death and rebirth of stars.

The Eskimo Nebula got its name because the astronomer who discovered it in 1787 thought it looked like a person's head surrounded by a parka hood. This highly detailed image taken in 2000 by the Hubble Space Telescope, however, reveals a much more complex structure, one which astrophysicists are still trying to explain.

An infrared image of the Rosette Nebula shows super-hot O stars (blue dots inside spheres) amid a torrent of gas and dust (green and red). This star-forming nebula, which lies 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros, is named for its rosebud-like shape when seen using only optical light.

This true-color mosaic captured by the Hubble Space Telescope shows a small portion of the Orion Nebula. The image provides unprecedented detail of the nebula, revealing elongated objects oriented on the region's brightest stars, rapidly expanding plumes of material around young stars, and protoplanetary disks.



This dark column of cool molecular hydrogen gas and dust is part of the Eagle Nebula, a star-forming region 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Serpens. In this image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, new stars can been seen inside fingerlike protrusions extending from the top of the nebula. Each "fingertip" is slightly larger than our entire solar system.


The Cat's Eye Nebula contains some of the most complex gas formations astronomers have ever seen, including concentric shells, high-speed jets, and unusual shock-induced knots. Some scientists think the nebula's intricate structures suggest it is a double-star system.

Sunlight sneaks through a crevice in Antelope Canyon near Page, Arizona.

Raised terraces in northern Congo suggest past cultivation.

Bright petals mark the hibiscus, a flowering plant found in much of the world.

Concentric rings of color decorate a crystal found in Albany, Oregon.

In spite of surface temperatures of 900 degrees Fahrenheit (482 degrees Celsius) and atmospheric pressure 92 times that of sea level on Earth, Russian spacecraft Venera 13 captured the first color photos of the desertlike surface of Venus on March 1, 1982. This 170-degree panorama, which includes the zigzag lip of the lander at bottom, was created using blue, green, and red filters.

This 2004 photograph made by the European Southern Observatory shows the first known photo of an exoplanet, or a planet beyond our solar system. The red orb at bottom left is a young planet, similar in composition to Jupiter, orbiting a brown dwarf, a dim, failed star that is probably 42 times less massive than the sun. An infrared camera, which reacts to heat rather than light, shot these photos from a distance of some 230 light-years.

Taking advantage of a relatively new technology, the daguerreotype, French physicists Louis Fizeau and Leon Foucault made the first successful photographs of the sun on April 2, 1845. The original image, taken with an exposure of 1/60th of a second, was about 4.7 inches (12 centimeters) in diameter and captured several sunspots, visible in this reproduction.

Representing 800 exposures taken during 400 Hubble Space Telescope orbits around Earth from September 2003 to January 2004, this galaxy-studded photo is the deepest visible-light image of the cosmos ever taken. Nearly 10,000 galaxies are represented in this view, dubbed the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which scientists describe as peering through an 8-foot-long (2.4-meter-long) straw to get a deep core sample of the universe.

A symbol of mankind’s giant leap, this photo of man’s small step—astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s—shows one of the first human prints left on the surface of the moon. Aldrin took this photo of his own footprint during NASA’s 1969 Apollo 11 mission.


This famous "Blue Marble" shot represents the first photograph in which Earth is in full view. The picture was taken on December 7, 1972, as the Apollo 17 crew left Earth’s orbit for the moon. With the sun at their backs, the crew had a perfectly lit view of the blue planet.

This photo reveals the first view of Earth from the moon, taken by Lunar Orbiter 1 on August 23, 1966. Shot from a distance of about 236,000 miles (380,000 kilometers), this image shows half of Earth, from Istanbul to Cape Town and areas east, shrouded in night.

When Apollo 8 was deployed in 1968, its sole photographic mission was to capture high-resolution images of the moon’s surface, but when the orbiting spacecraft emerged from a photo session on the far side of the moon, the crew snapped this, the most famous shot of the mission. Dubbed "Earthrise," this view of the Earth rising from the horizon of the moon helped humans realize the fragility of their home.

The first Martian's-eye-view of Earth and its moon was captured on May 8, 2003, by a camera aboard NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor craft. Shot from Mars at a distance of 86 million miles (139 million kilometers) from Earth, the image reveals an illuminated slice of Earth’s Western Hemisphere—as well as a celestial perspective of the world in which we live.

Shortly after Viking 1 landed on Mars on July 20, 1976, its Camera 2 captured the first photograph ever taken of the planet’s surface. This 300-degree image shows Chryse Planitia, the flat, low-lying plain of Mars’s northern hemisphere, littered with mechanical parts from the lander and rocks that range from four to eight inches (10 to 20 centimeters) across.