space photos

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the universe, not a star complex was stirring, not even Cygnus X! Merry Christmas from Popular Science. We're taking off a couple days to go spend time with our families. Enjoy these festive space pics in the meantime. Miss you already.

The deepest images taken to date show the universe when it was only 3 percent of the age it is now.

ESA's Mars Express orbiter snaps some 3-D images.

Really! "Earth As Art," a free e-book from NASA, shows off surreal photos of Earth with light taken outside the visible spectrum. Here are 19 of our favorites.

Glowing galactic center located near a supermassive black hole

The ESA's XMM-Newton observatory captures a huge X-ray emitting bubble in nearby Canis Major.

This is the largest, deepest, and most accurate color-magnitude diagram ever produced, containing more than 10 times the stars in any previous study.

The images are the highest-resolution ever taken in the near infrared range. It looks much more active than when Voyager flew past in 1986.

It's the first time scientists have obtained 3-D information about a star's death spiral and offers a hint of our own sun's far future.

Eleven-thousand years ago a star exploded, sending a wispy witch's broomstick flying across the southern sky.