The high altitude balloon twists in the wind just seconds prior to aborting the launch, during the final manned flight of Red Bull Stratos, a mission to the edge of space to break the speed of sound in freefall, in Roswell, New Mexico, USA, on October 9, 2012.

Simeis 147, a supernova remnant also known as Sharpless 2-240, is an object typically photographed with narrowband filters, because under visible light it just appears too “poor” in comparison.

This is mainly due to the fact that this object is extremely faint when imaged through RGB filters - and not too bright when using narrowband filters either! Narrowband data however deprives us from viewing the many other things happening around it.

Captured at Henry Coe State Park, DARC Observatory and Montebello OSP, California, on November 2011.

The Over Land Transporter (OLT) is moved into position below the space shuttle Endeavour not long after it was demated from the NASA 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA) during the early morning hours on Saturday, Sept. 22, 2012, at Los Angeles International Airport. Photo by Bill Ingalls for NASA.

Endeavour, built as a replacement for space shuttle Challenger, completed 25 missions, spent 299 days in orbit, and orbited Earth 4,671 times while traveling 122,883,151 miles.

Beginning Oct. 30, the shuttle will be on display in the California Science center’s Samuel Oschin Space Shuttle Endeavour Display Pavilion, embarking on its new mission to commemorate past achievements in space and educate and inspire future generations of explorers.

Dr. Anna Fisher, an American chemist and a NASA Astronaut. She graduated from UCLA with a BS in Chemistry in 1971, an MD (specializing in emergency medicine) in 1976, and eventually an MS in Chemistry in 1987. She was in the first class of women selected to go into space in 1978.

Dr. Fisher’s flight into space (on the Discovery) launched on November 8, 1984, a little over a year after the birth of her first child. She was the first mother to fly into space, and the crew’s flight patch was designed with six stars: Five representing each of the crew members, and one star for her daughter. She also kept a picture of her baby girl on her shuttle locker while she was in space, and later gifted each of her girls part of the necklace she wore on the flight.

Hubble’s panoramic view of a star-forming region.

30 Doradus is the brightest star-forming region in our galactic neighbourhood and home to the most massive stars ever seen. The nebula resides 170 000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small, satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. No known star-forming region in our galaxy is as large or as prolific as 30 Doradus.

The image comprises one of the largest mosaics ever assembled from Hubble photos and includes observations taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys, combined with observations from the European Southern Observatory’s MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope which trace the location of glowing hydrogen and oxygen.

NASA’s Project Gemini was designed to test technologies and techniques for the Apollo Program. The two-man Gemini spacecraft was larger and more sophisticated than its Mercury predecessor.

The spacecraft was designed by a team of NASA engineers led by Jim Chamberlin, and built by McDonnell Aircraft, in St Louis. There were two uncrewed test flights (1964, 1965) and 10 crewed (March 23, 1965 until November 11–15, 1966) all launched on a Titan II missile. The Gemini flights helped NASA learn to work and live in space, paving the way for the successful Apollo human landings on the Moon.

Panorama of Mars. This full-circle scene combines 817 images taken by the panoramic camera (Pancam) on NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity.

Launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery from the NASA Kennedy Space Center, 1984. It was the third operational orbiter following the Space Shuttle’s Columbia and Challenger.

The Soyuz TMA-04M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on May 15, 2012, carrying Expedition 31 Soyuz Commander Gennady Padalka, NASA Flight Engineer Joseph Acaba and Flight Engineer Sergei Revin to the International Space Station (ISS). Photo by Bill Ingalls.

The Space Shuttle Enterprise is towed on a barge underneath the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York City on its way to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum.

The craft will dock at Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, on Sunday night before tomorrow’s trip to the Manhattan’s west side, and lifted onto its new home on the flight deck of the Intrepid.

The Soyuz TMA-22 spacecraft is seen as it lands with Expedition 30 Commander Dan Burbank, and Flight Engineers Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin in a remote area outside of the town of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan, on Friday, April 27, 2012.

NASA Astronaut Burbank, Russian Cosmonauts Shkaplerov and Ivanishin are returning from more than five months onboard the International Space Station where they served as members of the Expedition 29 and 30 crews. Photo by Carla Cioffi.

Flowing Barchan sand dunes on Mars, looking like liquid. Although liquids freeze and evaporate quickly into the thin atmosphere of Mars, persistent winds may make large sand dunes appear to flow and even drip like a liquid. Visible on the above image right are two flat top mesas in southern Mars when the season was changing from Spring to Summer.

A light dome topped hill is also visible on the far left of the image. As winds blow from right to left, flowing sand on and around the hills leaves picturesque streaks. The dark arc-shaped droplets of fine sand are called barchans, and are the interplanetary cousins of similar Earth-based sand forms. Barchans can move intact a downwind and can even appear to pass through each other.

When seasons change, winds on Mars can kick up dust and are monitored to see if they escalate into another of Mars’ famous planet-scale sand storms.

Moon Io gliding past planet Jupiter. The most volcanic body in the solar system, Io (usually pronounced “EYE-oh”) is 3,600 kilometers in diameter, about the size of planet Earth’s single large natural satellite.

The Cassini spacecraft captured this awe inspiring view of active Io with the largest gas giant as a backdrop, offering a stunning demonstration of the ruling planet’s relative size.

Although in the above picture Io appears to be located just in front of the swirling Jovian clouds, Io hurtles around its orbit once every 42 hours at a distance of 420,000 kilometers or so from the center of Jupiter. That puts Io nearly 350,000 kilometers above Jupiter’s cloud tops, roughly equivalent to the distance between Earth and Moon.

The Cassini spacecraft itself was about 10 million kilometers from Jupiter when recording the image data.

After a two-year delay, the space shuttle Columbia is posed for launch this spring from Cape Canaveral. Photo by Jon Schneeberger, National Geographic, Vol. 159, No. 3, March 1981.

Note the tiny tiny photographer between the caterpillars of the crawler-transporter.