Space Pictures This Week: Saturn Storm, Sun Blast

Goodnight, Tokyo

Photograph courtesy NASA

Tokyo’s bustling streets resemble a fragile, glittering web when viewed from the International Space Station. The nighttime shot was captured by an Expedition 33 crew member on November 14. The dark area in the upper left is Tokyo Bay.

Published November 30, 2012

Solar Swirl

Image courtesy SDO/NASA

A luminous eruption of gas, called a prominence, swirled just behind the edge of the sun for about a day beginning on November 18. (Read more about solar storms in National Geographic magazine.) Magnetic fields above the area make such events fairly common, but this stunning profile view was captured in extreme ultraviolet light by the Solar Dynamics Observatory.

Published November 30, 2012

Herculean Proportions

Image courtesy NASA/ESA/RIT/NRAO/AUI/NSF

Hercules A, the largest galaxy in the constellation Hercules, is flanked by spectacular plumes shot from a supermassive black hole at the galaxy's core.

The optically invisible plumes—jets of high-energy plasma beams, subatomic particles, and magnetic fields—were revealed by combining the imaging power of Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico. (More Hubble pictures.)

Hercules A is roughly a thousand times more massive than the Milky Way and emits nearly a billion times more power in radio wavelengths than our sun. It is about two billion light-years away.

Published November 30, 2012

Desert Dazzler

Photograph by Babak Tafreshi, TWAN

Jupiter twinkles above a desert mesquite tree in Death Valley, California, in this November 2012 image. Toward the right of the frame, the constellation Taurus is visible.  (Related: Best Night-Sky Pictures of 2012.)

Published November 30, 2012

Icy Rings

Image courtesy Caltech/SSI/NASA

A steeply inclined orbit gives NASA's Cassini spacecraft a spectacular view of Saturn's rings, composed of ice and rock.

This newly released image was taken at a distance of about 1.5 million miles (2.4 million kilometers) on August 19, 2012, with a wide-angle camera.

Published November 30, 2012

Next: Space "Horse," Mars Rover

Photograph by Greg Parker, Your Shot

Published November 30, 2012