This image of Comet Catalina was taken by Jose Chambo on December 21st, 2015. It shows the Comet Catalina (C/2013 US10) in Earth’s predawn skies and also shows the star Arcturus and the constellation of Virgo.

This wonderful sight is brought to us courtesy of the Cassini spacecraft which has been studying Saturn and its satellites over the last decade. Enceladus can be seen above Saturn’s rings while Rhea lies below them in this picture. The tiny Atlas (only 30 kilometers across) is also supposedly captured just to the left of Rhea, expertly hidden within one of Saturn’s rings. This picture was taken using Cassini’s narrow angle camera or Imaging Science System. Cassinia was somewhere between 2 million and 2.8 million kilometers from these Saturnian moons when this picture was taken.

Darkness falls on the night side of massive Saturn and its tiny moon Tethys. Tethys is literally quite tiny as it is just 1,062 kilometers across and in this picture, is just barely seen (thanks to being brightened by NASA in post production) in the lower left quadrant.

The Cassini spacecraft took this picture with its wide-angle camera, utilizing a special filter allows near-infrared light wavelengths. It was taken when Cassini was about 2.4 million kilometers from Saturn.

These surface chasms on Saturn’s moon Dione are of great interests to scientists. Some parts of the surface are covered by linear features, called chasmata which is in dramatic contrast to the impact craters that one would typically see on planet, satellites and other celestial bodies. This view from a distance of 110,000 kilometers was taken by Cassini Orbiter’s narrow angle camera with North looking up on Dione.

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft captured these bright lights on the dwarf planet Ceres using its framing camera. This picture was taken when Dawn was making a pass of Ceres on June 15, 2015 from a distance of about 4,400 kilometers.

The last few weeks have been monumental for NASA, including the New Horizons spacecraft making its closest approach ever to the dwarf planet Pluto on July 14th.

This composite picture of Pluto was put together using four different  images taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on New Horizons and colour data from a different instrument. The pictures were taken when the spacecraft was about 450,000 kilometers from Pluto and have a resolution of 2.2 kilometers.

One shouldn’t stare at the Sun with the naked eye but its perfectly good to stare at this composite picture from several specialized telescopes (NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array; their Solar Dynamics Observatory and Japan’s Hinode spacecraft). The active regions across the sun’s surface contain material heated to several millions of degrees with the blue-white areas showing the most energetic spots with mini-flares being ejected.

NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) contributed data which helped astronomers and scientists put together this image of our Milky Way galaxy, in its very familiar spiral arms shape. Residing within the spiral arms are clusters of young stars that are shrouded in dust. These newly discovered stars are called embedded clusters.

NASA’s Terra spacecraft utilized its Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) camera to take this picture on Earth. The Wolf volcano on Isabela Island in the Galapagos Islands recently erupted with lava flows accompanied by ash and smoke. The hot lava flows from the eruption are highlighted in red in this thermal infrared image.

This view of Saturn’s rings was taken by the Cassini spacecraft’s wide angle camera. The picture was taken at a distance of 911,000 kilometers from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-Cassini, angle of 37 degrees. The rings of Saturn look like flat platters at in this picture. Also (barely) visible near the eight o’clock position, by the planet’s A-ring, is Saturn’s satellite Prometheus.