NASA has released a gallery of space images on Flickr, to celebrate the premiere of Neil deGrasse Tyson's new television series Cosmos: A Space Time Odyssey.
From enormous solar flares to the remnants of dying stars and psychedelic vortices, the images capture the extraordinary reality of space.
The documentary programme premiered on Fox and the National Geographic Channel this week, as a follow-up to the 1980s television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which was presented by Carl Sagan.
The Carina Nebula, an interstellar cloud of dust, hydrogen, helium and other ionised gases.NASA/Hubble
This vertigo-inducing, false-colour image from NASA's Cassini mission highlights the storms at Saturn's north pole. The angry eye of a hurricane-like storm appears dark red while the fast-moving hexagonal jet stream framing it is a yellowish green. Low-lying clouds circling inside the hexagonal feature appear as muted orange colour. A second, smaller vortex pops out in teal at the lower right of the image. The rings of Saturn appear in vivid blue at the top right.NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
Artist's depiction of the powerful flare that erupted from the red dwarf star EV Lacertae in 2008.NASA/Casey Reed
This colourful view of Mercury was produced by using images from the colour base map imaging campaign during MESSENGER's primary mission. These colours are not what Mercury would look like to the human eye, but rather the colours enhance the chemical, mineralogical, and physical differences between the rocks that make up Mercury's surface.NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
Astronomers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to photograph the iconic Horsehead Nebula in a new, infrared light to mark the 23rd anniversary of the famous observatory's launch aboard the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990.NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope has caught Jupiter's moon Ganymede playing a game of 'peek-a-boo'. In this Hubble image, Ganymede is shown just before it ducks behind the giant planet.NASA, ESA, and E. Karkoschka (University of Arizona)
This computer-simulated image shows gas from a tidally shredded star falling into a black hole. Some of the gas also is being ejected at high speeds into space. Astronomers observed a flare in ultraviolet and optical light from the gas falling into the black hole and glowing helium from the star's helium-rich gas expelled from the system.NASA; S. Gezari, The Johns Hopkins University; and J. Guillochon, University of California, Santa Cruz
The Crab Nebula is a supernova remnant, all that remains of a tremendous stellar explosion. Observers in China and Japan recorded the supernova nearly 1,000 years ago, in 1054.NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University)
A long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun's atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, travelled at over 900 miles per second. The CME did not travel directly toward Earth, but did connect with Earth's magnetic environment, or magnetosphere, causing aurora to appear in September 2012Courtesy of David Cartier, Sr.
Saturn's auroras put on a dazzling display of light.Hubble/NASA
Magnificent coronal mass ejection erupts on the Sun with Earth to scaleNASA/GSFC/SDO
This illustration shows a stage in the predicted merger between our Milky Way galaxy and the neighbouring Andromeda galaxy, as it will unfold over the next several billion years. In this image, representing Earth's night sky in 3.75 billion years, Andromeda (left) fills the field of view and begins to distort the Milky Way with tidal pull.NASA; ESA; Z. Levay and R. van der Marel, STScI; T. Hallas; and A. Mellinger
A 'Blue Marble' image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard Nasa's most recently launched Earth-observing satellite - Suomi NPP.NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring
The Ring Nebula, a planetary nebula in the northern constellation of Lyra.NASA/Hubble
