Here's two photos taken by the Curiosity Rover on Mars. What are those small stones on the ground? One is a ball and the others are star patterns of some sort.
Above is a picture of the four habitable moons of Jupiter and Saturn. It's not impossible that life may be found on these worlds, though in the case of Titan it would have to be life that could exist in liquid methane.
If you're surprised to see Ganymede on that list, that's because interior seas have recently been detected there.
Here's (above) surface detail on the Comet Churyumov-Gerisimenko. The Rosetta probe continues to map it in an attempt to find a suitable spot for its lander. This picture was taken only a few weeks ago.
Hubble took this picture (above) of the Bubble Nebula. It looks tiny in this photo but actually it's immense. The bubble you see is 10 light years in diameter and was ejected from a giant star that's visible inside the nebula.
Here's (above) a galaxy that's visible with the naked eye. It's a small galaxy called the Small Magellanic Cloud. It's in the process of colliding with our own galaxy, as is its namesake, The Large Magellanic Cloud (not visible here). Our galaxy is larger and older than many and has likely absorbed other colliding galaxies in the past. Maybe that's how we got the bar in the middle of our pinwheel.
I never heard of this (above) til recently but evidently it's something astronomy enthususiasts have known about for a long time: the Zodiacal glow. It's dim but you can see it with the naked eye on an unusually clear night. It's a disc of dust that surrounds the sun on the same plane as most of the planets and asteroids. We see it edgewise because we're on that plane, too.
The Milky Way has recently been identified as member of a cluster of thousands of galaxies called The Laniakea Supercluster. That's a computer generated image of it above. The white dots in the green areas are all galaxies. The wispy white lines track the paths of some galaxies toward Laniakea's center.
White dots outside the orange line belong to other super clusters, even though in a single image it looks like they belong with us. I have a feeling there's an interesting story behind that.
