Space pictures
Picture of the Victoria Crater taken by NASA’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The Victoria Crater is found in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars (located at 2.05°S, 5.50°W) and this impact crater measures approximately half a mile across.
NASA’s New Horizons probe looked back to take a picture of Jupiter while on the way to accomplish its Pluto-Kuiper Belt mission. This picture was taken by the space probe’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) when it was about 1.5 billion miles from Jupiter. The giant planet can be seen as a half/partial phase and two of its moons, Ganymede and Europa, are barely visible in this nine millisecond exposure.
An Apollo 17 mission astronaut took this picture of the moon’s surface showing the barren lunar landscape with numerous craters, mountains and other geographical features.
This picture of the Whirlpool Galaxy (also known as Messier 51a; discovered by the great French astronomer Charles Messier in 1773; or M51a, or NGC 5194) was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. This galaxy is located about 31 million light years from our Milky Way galaxy and is part of the constellation Canes Venatici. The very distinctly spiral shaped, interacting and grand design Whirlpool Galaxy is estimated to be home to approximately 270 billion stars.
Crew of the departing Skylab 2 mission took this June 22, 1973 photo of the orbiting space station. The SL-2 crew comprised of Charles Conrad, Paul Weitz and Joseph Kerwin. They spent over 26 days in space and took this picture from the Skylab Command/Service Module as part of their final fly by inspection before returning back to Earth.
