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NASA's TESS captured this image of comet C/2018 N1.
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On a gray background a bright ball of light travels across the image from the right side to the left, at a slight angle upward. There are also other small dots sprinkled throughout the image, which mostly remain stationary throughout.
TESS Catches a Comet
The "Hand of God," a pulsar wind nebula, is imaged here by NASA's Chandra and NuSTAR missions.
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A supernova remnant rises like an ethereal hand up the center of the image. The “wrist” appears in bright white while the finger-like structures are formed from a tangle of yellow strands of emission. This hand-shaped nebula intersects a spotty red oval with dots of light.
X-ray View of 'Hand of God'
A brilliant tapestry of young stars flaring to life resembles a glittering fireworks display in this Hubble image.
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This image shows a dense cluster of stars just offset to the right from center. The stars in the cluster are predominantly white tinted with red. Across the entire image are additional stars with both red-tinted and blue-tinted stars. There is a pillowy nebula taking up the left side and bottom of the image. Within the nebula, several pillars of dark, dense gas are being shaped by the energetic light and strong stellar winds from the brilliant cluster of thousands of stars.
Hubble Spots Fireworks in Westerlund 2
This image of supernova remnant RCW 86 combines data from NASA's Chandra, WISE, and Spitzer as well as ESA's XMM-Newton.
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This starry background has red clouds scattered across the image. There’s a wide arc of blue, white and green at the bottom right of the image, and a thin arc running over the left and top of the image. Together these arcs almost form a circle.
Supernova Remnant RCW 86
NASA's Fermi discovered a gigantic, mysterious pair of gamma-ray bubbles extending above and below our galaxy's center.
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Magenta bubbles extend above and below a flat, clumpy Milky Way. The Milky Way is seen as a flat disk, with clouds of material lit from behind by bright stars and gas. This plane stretches almost the width of the image. Two magenta circles dominate the image, each resting at the center of the Milky Way’s plane, one above and one below.
Fermi Discovers Giant Gamma-ray Bubbles
This illustration explains the strong force, one of the four fundamental forces in the universe.
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This infographic is done mostly in shades of blue. At the top left is the title: "Strong Force." Below that is a block of text that reads: "The strong force holds together things that have the same charge. It's stronger than the electromagnetic force, so that's why atoms with multiple protons and neutrons don't fly apart. But most importantly, it holds together the quarks that make up protons and neutrons themselves. Each proton contains two up quarks and one down. Each neutron contains two down quarks and one up." Below and to the right of the text is an illustration of an atomic nucleus made of two blue protons and two red neutrons. To the left is a pop out that points back to one of the neutrons. This pop out shows a cluster of one yellow up quark and two pink down quarks. Dual directional arrows connect each quark to the other two. To the left of the nuclei is a pop out that points back to one of the protons. This pop out shows a cluster of two yellow quarks and one pink down quark. Dual directional arrows connect each quark to the other two.
Strong Force
This composite image of Centaurus A shows magnetic fields streamlines over an image of the galaxy.
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In the center of a black, starry background is a galaxy with two long jets. The galaxy shown in shades of white, orange, and brown looks like a thick pancake tilted to the left. The pancake appears furry with lines representing magnetic information from SOFIA embedded in the disk of the galaxy. From the center of the pancake, above and below it, are two plumes of orange that look like steam rising from a hot cup of tea.
Centaurus A
This image shows the entire gamma-ray sky using 12 years of data from NASA's Fermi.
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This image shows the sky as you would see it in gamma-ray light. It is an oval, which represents the sky folded out onto a flat surface. The oval is primarily blue, showing a background of gamma-rays that permeates the entire sky. A bright band in shades of yellow, orange, and red goes across the center of the image from left to right, which shows gamma rays from the plane of the Milky Way. There are dots of yellow and red throughout the rest of the image, indicating distant galaxies that emit gamma rays.
Fermi's 12-year View of the Gamma-ray Sky
This image from NASA's Spitzer shows the Cat's Paw Nebula.
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This image shows a starry background bathed in green clouds. At the center is a bright region of yellow and red clouds with two smaller circles of red, taken together these red regions resemble a cat’s footprint.
Cat's Paw Nebula
These doomed worlds were among the first and creepiest to be discovered as they orbit an undead star known as a pulsar.
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A poster done in the style of movie posters from the 1950s and 1960s showing the zombie worlds with a colorful nebula and a planet being blasted by twin beams of radiation by the pulsar host star. The overall image creates the look of a scary skull.
Zombie Worlds – "Galaxy of Horrors" poster (English)
A real monster black hole is revealed in this image from NASA's NuSTAR and Hubble.
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Three panels show the same region of sky in different wavelengths of light. On the left is a high-energy X-ray image, which has a bright white spot at the center with a halo of reds and yellows. The halo is brightest on the left side of the white central spot. On the right is the optical light image, which shows two cloudy ovals in shards of white, pale blue and red coming together. Where they meet the image is very bright. Also in the image are a few background spots of light on the black background. In the central image, the X-ray and optical images are shown together, so we see the bright spot where the galaxies come together surrounded by the red X-ray haze.
Tale of Two Black Holes
This illustration explains the gravitational force, one of the four fundamental forces in the universe.
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This infographic is done mostly in shades of blue. At the top left is the title: "Gravitational Force." Below that is a block of text that reads: "Gravity, the force that draws objects together, can be understood as bends and curves in the fabric of space-time. Anything with mass makes these dents, from the Earth and Moon to turtles and cats." Below the text, taking up most of the image, is an illustration of Earth and the Moon which is on top of an oval that contains concentric rings outlined in orange representing the fabric of space-time. Directly beneath Earth and the Moon are dips in space-time.
Gravitational Force
AU Microscopii is one of the youngest planetary systems ever observed, and its star throws vicious temper tantrums!
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Giant flares from a giant, bright young star in oranges, reds and bright yellow burst from the star, affecting a nearby planet. You can see the planet’s atmosphere being blasted away by the energy.
Flares of Fury – "Galaxy of Horrors" poster (English)
This festive portrait of our Milky Way galaxy comes from ESA's Planck mission.
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This oval image represents a view of the entire sky unfolded and laid out flat. Running horizontally across the middle of the oval is a bright line of white, which is light emitted by gas and dust in the plane of the Milky Way. Mottled red fills the oval with a few areas of yellow, especially along the plane of the Milky Way and extending above and below it. Over all of this, in the center, is a thick ring of blue.
A Milky Way 'Mixer' Amongst the Stars
NASA's Chandra detected the X-rays from Uranus.
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Uranus is depicted in blues and pinks, encircled by a near vertical white ring. The blue and white colors represent optical data obtained by the Keck-1 Telescope, and the pink represents X-ray data gathered by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The blues, which appear as blended, near vertical stripes, range from midnight blue at our right, to teal and even neon sky blue at our left. Across the right half of the planet is a teardrop-shaped patch of neon pink. Several pale blue dots mark the surface of the planet, though none appear in the hot pink patch. The near vertical ring, which is slightly tipped toward our upper-right, is quite thin. It appears white when set against the black background, and pink when it passes in front of the planet's pink patch.
Chandra Studies Uranus in X-rays
These images show the steadily improving view of the Moon’s gamma-ray glow from NASA’s Fermi.
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The image is broken up into a grid of eight panels. The first panel has text that reads: “Fermi Images the Moon. These images show the Fermi mission’s improving view of the Moon’s gamma-ray glow. Brighter colors correspond to greater numbers of gamma rays above 31 million electron volts, tens of millions of times the energy of visible light. At these energies, the Moon is actually brighter than the Sun. The glow comes from cosmic rays, particles that constantly bombard the lunar surface. The Moon has no magnetic field, which would screen out lower-energy particles. So instead they strike and interact with the surface, which produces gamma rays. Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration.” The first panel also includes a visible-light image of the Moon, which is small in the center of the panel. The subsequent panels are labeled 2 months, 4 months, 8 months, 16 months, 32 months, 64 months, and 128 months. Each shows a bright yellow region in the middle surrounded by a haze of orange that fades into light red at the edges of the image. The first image is extremely pixelated, with the the central circle coming into more focus with each subsequent image.
Fermi Sees the Moon in Gamma Rays
The blue dots in this field of galaxies were detected by NASA's NuSTAR.
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On a field of black there are small yellow and red dots spread across the image. About a dozen larger, blue dots are scattered amongst the smaller, paler sources.
A Black Hole 'Choir'
This image captured by NASA's SOFIA shows narrow structures channeling material into the Serpens South star cluster.
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This view of a starry sky is bathed in red cloud-like structures. There is a bright grouping of stars just above and to the left of center in the image. These stars are bright white with large diffraction spikes, long lines like an asterisk over each star. The background changes to an electric green behind the concentration of stars. Lines in the image show where magnetic fields run. They run left to right over the main grouping of stars, but gradually change to be tilted from bottom left up to the right just below the grouping of stars.
Magnetic ‘Rivers' Feed Young Stars
NASA's WISE captured this image of the Andromeda galaxy, also called Messier 31 or M31.
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M31 is a spiral galaxy seen in this image against a black sky speckled with blue points of light. It appears like a flying disk toy seen tilted up and to the left, with a bright orange circle of light and tendrils of orange and pale blue light swirling in toward a central bright, white spot.
WISE Studies Our Neighbor Andromeda
NASA's Spitzer penetrates dust hiding the Milky Way's center in this image.
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At the center of this starry vista is a bright white spot surrounded by warm knots of red clouds. The clouds extend across the image from left to right and nearly all the way from the bottom to the top, with some black sky visible toward the top of the image. Within the red wispy clouds, there are clouds that appear black, regions that are so dense, they are blocking our view.
Revealing the Milky Way's Center
The Webb telescope captured this composite image of Jupiter.
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Jupiter dominates the black background of space. The planet is striated with swirling horizontal stripes of neon turquoise, periwinkle, light pink, and cream. The stripes interact and mix at their edges like cream in coffee. Along both of the poles, the planet glows in turquoise. Bright orange auroras glow just above the planet’s surface at both poles.
Webb Peeks Into Jupiter's Inner Life
NASA's Webb captured this image of the star-forming region NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula.
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The image is divided horizontally by an undulating line between a cloudscape forming a nebula along the bottom portion and a comparatively clear upper portion. Speckled across both portions is a starfield, showing innumerable stars of many sizes. The smallest of these are small, distant, and faint points of light. The largest of these appear larger, closer, brighter, and more fully resolved with 8-point diffraction spikes. The upper portion of the image is blueish, and has wispy translucent cloud-like streaks rising from the nebula below. The orangish cloudy formation in the bottom half varies in density and ranges from translucent to opaque. The stars vary in color, the majority of which, have a blue or orange hue. The cloud-like structure of the nebula contains ridges, peaks, and valleys – an appearance very similar to a mountain range. Three long diffraction spikes from the top right edge of the image suggest the presence of a large star just out of view.
Webb Reveals the Carina Nebula
This photo shows 18 of Roman's detectors mounted in an engineering test unit of the mission's focal plane array. 
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At the center of the photo is a set of 18 square detectors on a gold platform. They're arranged in six columns of three detectors such that the top of the middle two columns are close to the top of the image, the next two columns are a little lower down, and the two outer columns are even lower. The detectors are different shades of blue from royal blue to teal.
NASA Roman's Heat-Vision ‘Eyes'
¡Esta galaxia escalofriantemente encantada dejó de crear estrellas, de manera misteriosa, solo unos pocos miles de millones de años tras el big bang!
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Una estrella escarlata se cierne tras las ruinas de un exoplaneta que se asemeja en su forma a una calavera. Un brazo de galaxia rojo es visible en el fondo. Es evidente que esta galaxia, llamada MACS 2129-1, ha estado deteriorándose desde que dejó de producir estrellas solo unos pocos miles de millones de años después del Big Bang.
Cementerio Galáctico – "Galaxy of Horrors" póster (En Español)
This mosaic of NASA's Swift is created from images of astronomical objects captured by the satellite.
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When taking this image as a whole, it looks like the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a telescope with a central cylindrical body and solar panels on either side. Upon closer inspection, though, the image is made from small individual images of different astronomical objects that were taken by the telescope.
Swift Millionth Image Mosaic

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The Large Area Telescope aboard NASA’s Fermi satellite can give us a glimpse of an otherwise invisible cosmic light show.
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NASA's Fermi Captures Dynamic Gamma-Ray Sky in New Animation
NASA's Fermi Captures Dynamic Gamma-Ray Sky in New Animation
The rare sight of a Wolf-Rayet star was one of the first observations made by NASA’s Webb in June 2022.
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NASA's Webb Telescope Captures Rarely Seen Prelude to Supernova
NASA's Webb Telescope Captures Rarely Seen Prelude to Supernova
The irregular spiral galaxy NGC 5486 hangs against a background of dim, distant galaxies in this Hubble image.
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Hubble Spots a Star-Forming Spiral
Hubble Spots a Star-Forming Spiral
Scientists created a gargantuan synthetic survey showing what we can expect from the Roman Space Telescope’s future observations.
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Millions of Galaxies Emerge in New Simulated Images From NASA's Roman
Millions of Galaxies Emerge in New Simulated Images From NASA's Roman
This image features a galaxy called 3C 297 that is lonelier than expected after it likely pulled in and absorbed its former companion galaxies.
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Chandra Helps Astronomers Discover a Surprisingly Lonely Galaxy
Chandra Helps Astronomers Discover a Surprisingly Lonely Galaxy
A “jellyfish galaxy” with trailing tentacles of stars hangs in inky blackness in this Hubble image.
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Hubble Peers at a Galactic Seascape
Hubble Peers at a Galactic Seascape
NASA's Hubble captured photos of asteroid Dimorphos when it was deliberately hit by a spacecraft called DART in September 2022.
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Hubble Captures Movie of DART Asteroid Impact Debris
Hubble Captures Movie of DART Asteroid Impact Debris
A new simulation shows how NASA’s Roman Space Telescope will unveil the evolving universe in ways that have never been possible before.
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How NASA's Roman Space Telescope Will Rewind the Universe
How NASA's Roman Space Telescope Will Rewind the Universe
A massive galaxy cluster in the constellation Cetus dominates the center of this Hubble image.
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Hubble Observes Cosmic Contortions
Hubble Observes Cosmic Contortions
A new study using Chandra X-ray Observatory has tracked two pairs of supermassive black holes in dwarf galaxies.
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NASA's Chandra Discovers Giant Black Holes on Collision Course
NASA's Chandra Discovers Giant Black Holes on Collision Course
NASA will launch Israel’s first space telescope, the Ultraviolet Transient Astronomy Satellite (ULTRASAT).
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NASA to Launch Israel's First Space Telescope
NASA to Launch Israel's First Space Telescope
A spectacular trio of merging galaxies in the constellation Boötes takes center stage in this Hubble image.
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Hubble Views a Merging Galactic Trio
Hubble Views a Merging Galactic Trio
Astronomers revealed a deep field image from NASA’s Webb featuring never-before-seen details in a region of space known as Pandora’s Cluster.
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NASA's Webb Uncovers New Details in Pandora's Cluster
NASA's Webb Uncovers New Details in Pandora's Cluster
Some of the hottest spots in the Sun’s atmosphere appear in the telescope’s X-ray view.
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NASA's NuSTAR Telescope Reveals Hidden Light Shows on the Sun
NASA's NuSTAR Telescope Reveals Hidden Light Shows on the Sun
New Hubble images of Saturn herald the start of the planet's "spoke season," when enigmatic features appear across its rings.
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Hubble Captures the Start of a New Spoke Season at Saturn
Hubble Captures the Start of a New Spoke Season at Saturn
An asteroid roughly the size of Rome’s Colosseum has been detected by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
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Webb Detects Extremely Small Main Belt Asteroid
Webb Detects Extremely Small Main Belt Asteroid
Engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center finished testing the high-gain antenna for the Roman Space Telescope.
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High-Gain Antenna for NASA's Roman Mission Clears Environmental Tests
High-Gain Antenna for NASA's Roman Mission Clears Environmental Tests
A snapshot of the Tarantula Nebula is featured in this image from Hubble.
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Hubble's New View of the Tarantula Nebula
Hubble's New View of the Tarantula Nebula
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble have for the first time directly measured the mass of a single, isolated white dwarf.
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For the First Time Hubble Directly Measures Mass of a Lone White Dwarf
For the First Time Hubble Directly Measures Mass of a Lone White Dwarf
The bright variable star V 372 Orionis takes center stage in this Hubble image.
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Hubble Views a Stellar Duo in Orion Nebula
Hubble Views a Stellar Duo in Orion Nebula
Scientists discovered the first gamma-ray eclipses from a special type of binary star system using data from NASA’s Fermi.
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NASA's Fermi Detects First Gamma-Ray Eclipses From ‘Spider' Star Systems
NASA's Fermi Detects First Gamma-Ray Eclipses From ‘Spider' Star Systems
NASA’s Webb team will receive the 2023 John L. “Jack” Swigert, Jr., Award for Space Exploration, a top award from the Space Foundation.
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NASA's Webb Telescope Receives Top Space Foundation Award
NASA's Webb Telescope Receives Top Space Foundation Award
Astronomers used NASA’s Webb to obtain an inventory of the deepest, coldest ices measured to date in a molecular cloud.
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Webb Unveils Dark Side of Pre-stellar Ice Chemistry
Webb Unveils Dark Side of Pre-stellar Ice Chemistry
Objects scattered across this image from Hubble include galaxies near and far, Milky Way stars, and a solar system asteroid.
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Hubble Captures Cosmic Treasure Trove
Hubble Captures Cosmic Treasure Trove
Scientists shared findings and updates from NASA’s Webb at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.
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NASA Recaps Webb Telescope Findings From AAS Meeting
NASA Recaps Webb Telescope Findings From AAS Meeting