A rare positioning of planets Venus (top left) and Jupiter (top right) and the crescent moon of the Earth provides a "smiley" effect that captivated Asia Monday night Dec. 1, 2008 in Manila, Philppines. The heavens smiled down on Earth December 1 in National Geographic News's most viewed space photo of 2008.
Snapped by the Mars-orbiting HiRISE camera, billowing clouds of dust revealed the first-ever picture of active landslides occurring on Mars at the base of a towering slope near the planet's north pole in March.
In March scientists detected an interstellar explosion so bright that it was briefly visible to the naked eye—from 7.5 billion light-years away. Images captured by NASA's Swift satellite show two views of the unusual gamma-ray burst, an outpouring of high-energy radiation and particles thought to follow the collapse of a massive star.
Jupiter looks sharp in the crispest whole-planet picture of the gas giant ever shot from Earth, released in October
In April the Mars-orbiting HiRISE camera caught new high-resolution snapshots of Phobos, a Martian moon named for the Greek god of horror. The impact that created Stickney is thought to have almost shattered the roughly 17-mile-wide (27-kilometer-wide) moon.
An image released by NASA in April shows baby stars taking shape in the Southern Pinwheel galaxy. Embryonic stars were found to be growing in the galaxy's spindly arms (shown in red), rather than in its bright heart.
The remnant of a supernova called SN 1006 hangs like a gumball 7,000 light-years away in a composite image released by NASA on June 26, 2008. The blast wave from the stellar explosion is still traveling at about 6 million miles (9.6 million kilometers) an hour, heating gases along its path that emit radiation in visible light.
A supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way has wound up in the crosshairs of a virtual telescope spanning 2,800 miles (4,506 kilometers). Although by definition we can't see a black hole directly, we can see the bright region of radio emissions known as Sagittarius A* that's thought to be either a disk of matter swirling toward the black hole, or a high-speed jet of matter being ejected from it.
A Gemini adaptive optics image of the star 1RSX J160929.1-210524 and its likely ~8 Jupiter-mass companion (within red circle) in this handout released Sept. 15, 2008. Scientists have snapped the first images of a planet outside our solar system that is orbiting a star very much like the sun. In findings announced on Sept. 15, 2008, University of Toronto scientists said they used the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii to take direct pictures of the planet, which is about the size of Jupiter but with eight times the mass. This planet and the star it seems to orbit are located in our Milky Way galaxy about 500 light years from Earth, the scientists said.
Like a ribbon trailing from a parade float, a streamer of hydrogen gas seems to waft across the stars in an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Released in July, this festive shot of a supernova remnant was National Geographic News's tenth most viewed space photo of 2008.
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