Awesome pictures of space
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Spectators cheer as the United Launch Alliance Delta 4-Heavy rocket carrying NASA’s Orion spacecraft lifts off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Dec. 5. After two orbits around the planet, the capsule, an uncrewed version of the spaceship that NASA plans to use when it sends astronauts to an asteroid and eventually to Mars, splashed down in the Pacific.
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NASA released this Hubble Space Telescope image of the Monkey Head Nebula on March 17 to celebrate the 24th anniversary of the telescope's launch in 1990. The nebula is a star-forming region 6,400 light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion. This infrared view shows how the dusty cloud is being sculpted by ultraviolet light from hot stars in the center of the nebula.
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Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata peers out one of the windows of the Cupola on the International Space Station on April 27. A crewmate inside the Russian-built Pirs docking module captured the image. The Cupola is considered the station's best vantage point for Earth observation.
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Active regions on the sun resemble a jack-o'-lantern in this extreme ultraviolet image from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, captured on Oct. 8, just in time for Halloween.
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A camera looking back over SpaceShipTwo's fuselage shows the rocket burn with a Mojave Desert vista in the background during a test flight of the rocket plane on Jan. 10. Cameras were mounted on the exterior of SpaceShipTwo as well as its carrier airplane, WhiteKnightTwo, to monitor the rocket engine's performance. The test was aimed at setting the stage for eventual commercial space tours.
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Sheriff's deputies stand watch over a piece of debris at the crash site of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane near Cantil, California, on Nov. 1. The in-flight breakup killed one of the passenger craft's test pilots and injured the other.
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A star cluster in the heart of the Flame Nebula, known as NGC 2024, glows in a May 8 image that combines data from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory and Spitzer Space Telescope. Chandra's X-ray view is shown in purple, while red, green and blue hues add Spitzer's perspective in infrared wavelengths. The star cluster is about 1,400 light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion.
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Typhoon Hagupit churns in the western Pacific Ocean in this satellite image from Dec. 5. Typhoon Hagupit slammed into Philippines on Dec. 7, destroying thousands of homes and killing dozens of people.
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Russia's Soyuz TMA-13M spacecraft, carrying new crewmembers to the International Space Station, launched on May 29 at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
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NASA astronaut Barry Wilmore captured this picture of the Red Sea from the International Space Station on Nov. 8, with docked Russian spacecraft in the foreground.
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Chinese astronomers and others around the world witnessed the creation of the Crab Nebula by a supernova explosion in the year 1054. This 15th-anniversary image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, released July 22, shows a rapidly rotating neutron star spewing out a blizzard of high-energy particles from the heart of the Crab Nebula. Lower-energy X-rays are shown in red, medium energy in green, and high energy in blue.
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Star trails circle the celestial south pole over a cactus-dominated landscape in Chile's Atacama Desert, in a long-exposure image released by the European Southern Observatory on May 12. The trails show the apparent path of stars in the sky as Earth slowly rotates. A deeper exposure was superimposed over the magnificent trails, revealing fainter stars and the southern Milky Way.
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The G292.0+1.8 supernova remnant is shown in a newly processed image from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The picture is among several that were released July 22 to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Chandra's deployment from the space shuttle Columbia. Chandra's "X-ray vision" traces the expanding debris of an exploded star and the shock waves associated with the long-ago blast.
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Jupiter's icy moon, Europa, looms large in this reprocessed image released by NASA on Nov. 21. The original observations were collected by the Galileo spacecraft, which explored Jupiter and its moons from orbit in the 1990s. NASA officials reprocessed Galileo's data using modern imaging techniques. Europa's mineral-laced ice is thought to cover a deep ocean of water that some scientists suspect could harbor life.
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