There may be no enterprise that lends itself so well to the camera as space travel. The universe is a riot of color and light—of galaxies and planets and brightly hued moons. The people who explore space and the astronomers who study it with orbiting telescopes and ground-based observatories make their own contributions to the cosmic palette. The year just ending produced no shortage of striking space images. Here are just a few of the best.
Galactic Monocle
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It was in 1912 that Albert Einstein first proposed what he dubbed gravitational lensing—a phenomenon in which light from a background object like a star or a galaxy is bent by the gravity of a foreground object. Seven years later, the theory was proven when British scientists observed starlight bending around the sun during the 1919 solar eclipse. Since then, astronomers have observed all manner of lensing caused by all manner of bodies—perhaps none as visually striking as this image, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, of a foreground galaxy cluster lensing the light of a background spiral galaxy. The alignment of these two formations is so precise that the lensed light creates a complete circle around the galaxy cluster—a phenomenon called an Einstein ring.
Cosmic Eye
For astronomers looking for a place to build a telescope, Chile’s Atacama Desert is the go-to spot. Thanks to its high altitude; exceedingly dry, cloudless air; and distance from city lights, the Atacama is home to close to 70% of the world’s telescope infrastructure. The latest—and perhaps greatest—addition to that cosmic community is the Giant Magellan Telescope, now rising in the desert about 100 miles northeast of the coastal city of La Serena. The telescope is projected to be up to 200 times more powerful than existing ground-based ones, with the ability to look for biological signatures on distant worlds, study the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, watch stars form, and more. Magellan’s components—including its seven large primary mirrors—are being constructed in 36 U.S. states and four countries. Assembly will take place at the raw construction site captured in this image. First light—or the moment the telescope at last opens its eyes—is set for just after the end of this decade.
A Rock Gets a Visit
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is a versatile machine. Launched in 2021, it is on a mission to study Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids—clusters of rocks that both precede and follow the giant planet along its orbital path. But on April 20, as Lucy was passing through the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, it took time to pay a call on the asteroid known as Donaldjohanson, named after the famed anthropologist. Lucy got as close as 600 miles from the five-mile-long, two-mile-wide rock, providing new and more accurate measurements of its size, along with striking stop-action footage, with each image in this string taken about two seconds apart.
Moonbound
Time was, only government space programs had the wherewithal to land spacecraft on the moon. That’s all changed, thanks to NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which aims to enlist the private sector in helping to ferry cargo to the moon in support of a future crewed lunar base. On Jan. 15, the Blue Ghost spacecraft, built by Texas-based Firefly Aerospace, lifted off for the moon. En route, it snapped this image of the Earth it was leaving, reflected in the spacecraft’s solar panels. On March 2, Blue Ghost landed, becoming the first private spacecraft to execute a completely successful touch down on the lunar surface.
Lunar Travelers
From 1968 to 1972, two dozen men traveled to the moon—establishing an exceedingly exclusive fraternity that has not added a new member in more than half a century. That will change as early as February 2026, when the crew of NASA’s Artemis II will make a journey around the lunar far side, traveling farther from Earth that any humans have ventured before. The mission will make history not only because it could kick start a new age of lunar exploration, but because of the make-up of its crew, which will include the first woman, the first person of color, and the first non-American to visit the moon. On July 31, the crew suited up for training and took a moment to pose for a picture. They are, from left, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
Home at Last
Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were not planning to be away from home long when they lifted off on June 5, 2024 for the International Space Station, aboard their spanking new Boeing Starliner spacecraft, which was making its first test flight carrying crew. The itinerary called for them to be aboard the station for just eight days before flying their Starliner home. That’s not quite how things turned out. The spacecraft developed stubborn thruster problems and NASA’s and Boeing’s efforts to troubleshoot them ultimately failed, leaving Wilmore and Williams to wait—and wait and wait—until a Crew Dragon spacecraft with two open seats arrived as part of the station’s regular crew rotation. On March 18, 2025, they finally splashed down off the coast of Tallahassee, touching the planet for the first time in a very long 288 days.
Ghostly Nursery
Baby stars have brilliant births. Forming in great clouds of gas and dust known as nebula, they accrete from abundant hydrogen and helium, reach a critical gravitational mass, and then switch on their nuclear engines. Most nebulae emit their own light, but the one here, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, does not. Instead it is known as a reflection nebula, picking up light from the stars it creates and from nearby existing ones. Located just 480 light years from Earth, this reflection nebula, known as the Taurus Molecular Cloud, is illuminated principally by the three bright stars in the center of the image. The cloud’s relatively close proximity to Earth lends it to further study by astronomers wanting to learn more about how stars, and the protoplanets that circle them, form.
Northern Lights—Down South
Most of the time you have to go to Earth’s higher latitudes to see the northern lights—dramatic sky shows caused by charged particles from the sun colliding with the upper atmosphere and following the lines of the magnetic field toward the poles. But in November the lights took their show on the road, appearing across much of the country, including Shired Island in Florida, where this image—complete with a meteor—was captured. The dramatic expansion of the northern lights was caused by intense activity on the sun including multiple solar eruptions known as coronal mass ejections.
China Soars
China came late to the space game—at least compared to the U.S. and the old Soviet Union—but it’s caught up fast. One of its latest exploratory ventures was the May launch of the Tianwen-2 spacecraft, on its way to collect samples from a near-Earth asteroid and then visit a comet orbiting in the main belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. On May 30, the China National Space Administration released this image of the Earth taken by Tianwen-2 from a distance of more than 366,000 miles. The planet will shrink to just a point in the spacecraft’s eye when it reaches its targets, before growing again as Tianwen-2 soars home.
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