Saturn's rings and southern hemisphere in a false-color composite image. Using data from the Cassini spacecraft, the image was built using information taken from 65 separate observations, each about six minutes long.
A hidden star-forming cloud of dust and gas photographed by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. The cloud is located in the Cepheus constellation.
The galaxy Fornax A, at a distance of about 74 million light-years, is one of the nearest and brightest galaxies with giant radio lobes.
A dark mass of gas and dust, where new stars and planets will likely spring up, deep within a larger dark cloud called L183. Starlight that originated from nearby stars is being deflected off the core at infrared wavelength, accounting for the core's glowing effect.
Nebula DG 129, a cloud of gas and dust that reflects light from nearby, bright stars, found in the constellation Scorpius.
The Hubble Space Telescope provided this image of one-light-year-tall pillars of cold hydrogen and dust located in the Carina Nebula.
Comet Hartley 2 was 18 million miles away from Earth at the time of this photograph. On Oct. 20, the comet is expected to come as close as 11.2 million miles to the Earth. Meanwhile, the EPOXI space probe is on its way toward the comet in hopes of getting an up-close look.
The Magellanic Stream is an arc of hydrogen gas spanning more than 100 degrees of the sky as it trails behind the Milky Way's neighbor galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.
The heart of the Lagoon Nebula, as a massive cloud of glowing dust and gas gets bombarded by the radiation of new stars.
The Antennae galaxies, located about 62 million light years from Earth, in in this composite image from NASA's Great Observatories--the Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), the Hubble Space Telescope (gold and brown), and the Spitzer Space Telescope (red).
The barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365 in infrared light. NGC 1365, is one of the largest galaxies known to astronomers, is a member of the Fornax cluster of galaxies, and lies about 60 million light-years from Earth.
Another view of NGC 1365, which measures 200 000 light-years across. Astronomers think that the Milky Way may look very similar to this galaxy, but at half the size.
The Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Space Center in Florida gets lit up by a lightening show. Space geeks likely know that the VAB also is one of the largest structures in the world as its original function was to assemble the Apollo and Saturn vehicles. Nowadays, it's used to help with the space shuttle program.