Space photos of the year

July 10, 2015 • 9:00 am

by Grania

Mashable has a post up of the best space photos of the year.

These are my favorites, but head on over to see the rest of the shots – they are spectacular.

The meteor over Mount Rainier in Washington

Image: Brad Goldpaint

The Milky Way over the salt flat Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia

Image: Xiaohua Zhao

A red aurora over Yellowknife, Canada, apparently this type of aurora is extremely rare and is the result of high-altitude oxygen (with the geomagnetic storm, of course)

Image: O Chul Kwon

23 thoughts on “Space photos of the year”

    1. That one is gorgeous.

      Given that you like this one, have a look at another similar in subject.

      Milky Way above Atacama Salt Lagoon

      You have to open the larger image and view it on a decent monitor. Just in case, here is a link to the larger jpg image.

      Larger JPG

      A neat little tidbit is that there is a person in the image taking a picture, and that person is the fiancé of the person who took the picture.

  3. Green aurora = excited oxygen (I forget which kind, but likely some molecular excitation).

    Green is a rare astronomical color, we have 4 billion of evolution to thank that we think it is a common background.

    1. Thanks for that unique perspective…we all take photosynthesis for granted in a vast cosmos of no green.

  4. I’ve been collecting space / astronomy related photos for years. This looks like a good place to pick up a few more. Beautiful.

  5. Some of those would make fantastic wallpaper for one’s desktop. Awesome photos indeed.

  6. If you have never done it, you should make every effort to go somewhere where the Milky Way is visible in all its glory. Photographs can’t do it justice. You owe it yourself to see it from horizon to horizon at least once.

    1. Ah, “somewhere”…?? I would absolutely love to visit Cerro Armazones in Chile’s Atacama Desert — the best astronomical viewing site in the entire world. The view of the Milky Way from that location is unparalleled.

  7. “Mashable” completely overlooked the most amazing astronomical photo of the year. It was taken by the Hubble Telescope in January, and is a panoramic photo of the Andromeda Galaxy that is freely available on NASA’s Hubble website HERE:

    http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2015/02/image/a/

    The photo is extremely high-res, 347 megabytes!!

    Check out the Youtube “zoom in” video HERE:

    1. Thanks Sabunim. That helps to put things in perspective for me. Sometimes we worry too much about what is local. Good to keep in mind the extent of the universe.

  8. Mashable is a bit confused if they think pictures of moonrises, lightning, meteors, and auroras qualify as “space” photos.

    1. Well, so few of us have our own spaceships these days; so this is the best the average human can do while we are stuck on this hell-hole of a backwater planet in an embarrassingly unfashionable arm of the galaxy. 😛

      But seriously, there are a few nebula in the selection as well.

      ~ Grania

    1. Thanks abeatwood for this addendum. We need, sometimes, to see where we fit in relation to the cosmos as a whole. If I were dying…at the end of my years…I’d like this to be my last view of existence. Humanity in the mist of the universe.

  12. On the shot of Mt. Rainier, note the lines of climbers under headlamps going up on the Disappointment Cleaver Route (left) and the Emmons Glacier Route (right). Very cool addition.

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