LOST IN SPACE ...........


Many Moons
The roster of Jupiter’s extended family keeps growing—61 moons at last count, including Io. As seen here, Io hovers just above the Jovian cloud tops—but in fact keeping its distance 217,500 miles (350,000 kilometers) away.


A Star is Born
About 100 million to 300 million years after the big bang, in what had been an ocean of darkness, the first star was born. It happened inside a swirling cloud of hydrogen and helium gas gathered together by the gravity of dense, invisible “dark matter.” As the gases cooled, the center of the cloud collapsed into a dense clump. Over hundreds of thousands of years the clump in turn collapsed, triggering fusion and the birth of a star.



Winds of Change
Winds as strong as a thousand miles an hour (1,600 kilometers an hour) stripe the atmosphere of Saturn in an ultraviolet image captured on March 7, 2003, by the Hubble Space Telescope. The rings surrounding the planet are composed of dust and ice.




The Greatest View
No matter how many times astronauts have photographed Earth during two decades of space shuttle missions, the image in the rearview mirror has never become routine: that perfect blue marble, whorled with white, suspended against blackest space.


Big City Lights
Bright lights reveal big cities in western Europe, Japan, and the eastern U.S. in this composite image of the planet at night from military weather satellites. Other less urbanized places, such as western China and most of Africa, remain dark.


Living Large
Hats off to Hubble’s spectacular image of M104, the Sombrero galaxy, 28 million light-years from Earth. One of the most massive objects in the dense Virgo cluster of galaxies, the Sombrero’s bright core contains a black hole a billion times the mass of our sun.


Space Drifter
Untethered from the space shuttle, Bruce McCandless II drifts 217 miles (349 kilometers) above Earth using a nitrogen-propelled backpack in February 1984. McCandless was the first to use the pack he called a “great flying machine” for a space walk.



Foot Loose and Fancy Free
John Young gives a playful salute during the Apollo 16 lunar mission in 1972. A close look reveals that he’s bounding a foot and a half (46 centimeters) off the lunar surface. On Earth, Young in his bulky suit would have tipped the scales at almost 400 pounds (200 kilograms), but on the moon he weighed only about 65 pounds (30 kilograms).