Space

Mars is a small neighbor of Earth. North America almost fits on one half of Mars

The Euclid space telescope took the biggest and most detailed picture of the center of the Milky Way It captured more than 60 million stars, as well as nebulae and star clusters. Nine shots for the picture were taken over 26 hours!

In 2018, light from a supernova star in the galaxy NGC 2525 reached Earth. It took 70 million years to travel the whole way.

🕳️ Gravity that bends light. The black hole in this simulation shows how extreme mass distorts the paths of light around it. Two objects — a more massive black hole with a mass of about 200 million suns and its smaller companion — orbit each other, creating a complex distortion of space-time. Such models help scientists better understand what merging black hole systems look like and behave like, and what kind of gravitational waves such events can produce.

A collage of 16 supernovas 💥

🪐 Exoplanet map from TESS. TESS has presented one of the most complete maps of the starry sky, created over years of observations. Every marked dot on this mosaic is a confirmed or potential exoplanet. Besides searching for new worlds, the mission helps study stars, the structure of our galaxy, and even near-Earth asteroids, expanding our understanding of the Universe around us.

🌀 Celestial whirl. The Milky Way, with a long exposure, turns into a dynamic 'whirl' of light because of Earth's rotation, creating the effect of the sky moving around a still horizon. Shots like these, taken with long exposure, visually capture not the movement of the stars, but the rotation of the Earth itself relative to space.

🌍 The Milky Way from the south. The Milky Way looks especially bright from the Southern Hemisphere — the dense center of the galaxy, rising above the horizon, is more visible here. From the Crew Dragon ship, you get a rare view: you can see the galaxy's star stripe, the southern lights, and the trails of satellites orbiting Earth all at once.

The most detailed shot of Mimas, one of Saturn's moons

❤️❤️ The Growth of Las Vegas Over 40 Years. Las Vegas has noticeably expanded over the past decades — satellite data shows how the city gradually 'spreads out' over the desert landscape. Observations from the Landsat mission have been tracking these changes for decades, allowing us to see how urbanization literally reshapes the Earth’s surface.

👨‍🚀 Life in orbit isn’t just about work. On board the ISS, the day runs on a strict schedule: experiments, system maintenance, and workouts take up almost all of the crew’s time. But even in space, there’s room for downtime — the international crew gathers in the evenings, cooks meals, watches movies, and plays simple games in zero gravity. And perhaps that’s the main contrast: beyond Earth, people still remain people.

☀️ Sunlight glinting on the Euphrates. The Euphrates near Iraq reflects sunlight in a way that makes the water's surface almost mirror-like — this phenomenon is called 'specular reflection.' At the moment of shooting, the sun's rays hit at the perfect angle, turning the river into a bright silver stripe, highlighting the relief and structure of the surrounding landscape.

👽 Northern lights on the edge of dawn. Aurora over the planet is especially impressive when seen from orbit — at the moment of transition from night to day. From the ISS, these flashes look like thin green-purple curtains that seem to "slide" along the edge of the Earth with the sunrise.

Heart-shaped crater on Mars

Martian sand dunes through the Curiosity rover's lens.

🚀 Orion separation in space. Orion captures the moment when its crew module separates from the service module before entering Earth's atmosphere. This is a key stage of the return: after separation, the crew module continues its descent on its own, completing the mission by returning to Earth.

Alien landscapes for which you don't need a ticket to Mars: British photographer Jordan L-G has captured the Mangystau region of Kazakhstan from a bird's-eye view. Millions of years ago, the ancient ocean Tethys was splashing around here, and today, in its place, there are striped hills, chalk cliffs, and canyons with an almost cosmic appearance.

The Sun and details of its surface, captured through a narrowband H-alpha filter ☀️

NASA has announced the crew of the Artemis III mission, whose flight is scheduled for 2027 The Artemis III crew poses for an official portrait (from left: Andre Douglas, Luca Parmitano, Randy Bresnik, Frank Rubio).

The celestial bodies of the Solar System with correctly proportioned sizes, axial tilts, and rotation speeds 🌎