Dec. 18, 2015: NASA Releases New High-Resolution Earthrise ImageNASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured a unique view of Earth from the spacecraft's vantage point in orbit around the moon.

Best Space Photos of 2015

Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2015: The Milky Way galaxy arches above the platform of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) on Cerro Paranal, 8650 feet (2635 meters) above sea level in Chile. Our galaxy's cloudy and dusty structure glows in detail as a dim band across the facility’s observation deck. From Earth, the Milky Way appears as a band across the sky because of our vantage point in one of its spiral arms looking towards its center. Astrophotographer John Colosimo submitted this photograph to the Your ESO Pictures Flickr group.

Yuri Beletsky (Carnegie Las Campanas Observatory)Milky Way with Airglow Australis

Wally Pacholka (AstroPics.com, TWAN)The Milky Way Over Monument Valley

Alexandros MaragosThe Milky Way over the Temple of Poseidon

Sergio OtarolaMilky Way Panorama. Panorama made of 3 shots, showing the ALMA compact array at the AOS.

Sergio OtarolaALMA at night. Antennas of the ALMA compact array under the starry night and the Milky Way.

Sergio OtarolaMagellan clouds. ALMA 12 meters antennas in the foreground and the Magellan clouds raises over the horizon

Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2015: The Carina Nebula (NGC 3372) glows over one of the antennas included in the ALMA telescope on the Chajnantor plateau in the Chilean Andes. Star clusters NGC 3532 (right) and IC 2602 (left) also glow above the Carina Nebula. Image released Nov. 30, 2015.

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NASA/ESA/Hubble and the Hubble Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have assembled a bigger and sharper photograph of the iconic Eagle Nebula's "Pillars of Creation," rereleased in January 2015

NASA/Reuters This photo of Pluto was made during the New Horizons spacecraft's historic flyby of the dwarf planet in July 2015. New Horizons is now sailing into the Kuiper Belt for a rendezvous with another small world.

Adam Block—Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona This nebula named "Thor's Helmet" is powered by a central "Wolf Rayet" star whose explosive tantrums blow huge bubbles of gas and make them glow like neon. This star is easily 20 times the mass of the Sun and located 15,000 light years away. Eventually the star's instability will lead it to explode as a supernova. The photo was captured at the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter in Arizona and released on Jan. 3, 2015.

Terry Virts—NASA Super Typhoon Maysak, as seen from aboard the International Space Station on March 31, 2015. NASA Astronaut Terry Virts captured this image and tweeted "The eye of #Maysak typhoon really stands out early in the morning with the shadow being cast deep into the vortex." His ESA crewmate on station also viewed the storm and wrote, "Commands respect even from #space..."

Olav Jon Nesvold—EPA The total solar eclipse at Svalbard, Norway, on March 20, 2015. A partial solar eclipse was seen in Europe, northern and eastern Asia and northern and western Africa.

NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI Pluto's haze layer shows its blue color in this picture taken by the New Horizons spacecraft on Oct. 8, 2015 after it passed the dwarf planet. The high-altitude haze is thought to be similar to that seen at Saturn’s moon Titan. The source of both hazes likely involves sunlight-initiated chemical reactions of nitrogen and methane, leading to relatively small, soot-like particles called tholins.

NASA A NASA camera on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite captures the entire sunlit side of Earth from one million miles away on July 6, 2015

Celebrating 20 Years of the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO)After 20 years in space, ESA and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, is still going strong. Originally launched in 1995 to study the sun and its influence out to the very edges of the solar system, SOHO revolutionized this field of science, known as heliophysics, providing the basis for nearly 5,000 scientific papers.

Joel Kowsky—NASA The Orbital ATK Antares rocket, with a Cygnus spacecraft onboard, suffered a catastrophic explosion moments after launch on Oct. 28, 2014, at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The Cygnus spacecraft was filled with supplies slated for the International Space Station. The never before seen photographs were released by NASA this year.

Adam Block—Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona The Lagoon Nebula, a bright cloud of dust and gas 4,000 light years away and 40 light years across, glows brilliantly due to hot energetic young stars forming within. It can even be glimpsed with the unaided eye under dark skies away from city lights. The photo was captured at the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter in Arizona and released on July 15, 2015.

X-ray - NASA/CXC/Univ. Wisconsin-Madison/S.Heinz et al, Optical - DSS Circinus X-1 is an X-ray binary star known for its erratic variability can be seen in this photo released on June 23, 2015. Within the system, a dense neutron star, the collapsed remnant of a supernova explosion, orbits with a more ordinary stellar companion Circinus X-1 30,700 light-years away.

ESA/Hubble/NASA The spectacular cosmic pairing of the star Hen 2-427 and the nebula M1-67 was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, released on Aug. 21, 2015. The twin formation is located in the constellation of Sagittarius, 15,000 light-years away. The star shines brightly at the very center of the image. Surrounding it are hot clumps of gas being ejected into space at over 93,000 mph.

Stuart Palley—Zuma Press A meteor from the Perseid Meteor shower can be seen in the upper left corner in this long exposure image taken as a wildfire burned in Lake and Napa Counties near the town of Clearlake, Calif. on Aug. 12, 2015.

Matt Cardy—Getty Images The once in a generation supermoon total lunar eclipse viewed from Glastonbury, England, on Sept. 28, 2015. Three decades had passed since the last time Earth was witness to the triple crown of lunar events — a full moon, a lunar eclipse, and a lunar perigee all at the same time.

Bill Ingalls—NASA This composite image made from five frames shows the International Space Station, with a crew of nine onboard, in silhouette as it transits the sun at roughly five miles per second, on Sept. 6, 2015.

NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly, re-entering the International Space Station after his spacewalk on Oct. 29, 2015.

JM Guillon—CNES/EPA A Vega rocket lifts off from French Guiana on Dec. 3 2015, carrying the European Space Agency's LISA Pathfinder spacecraft, which will test methods for detecting gravity waves.

Aubrey Gemignani—NASA The supermoon, which occurs when the moon is full, with the closest approach to Earth on its elliptical orbit, above the Washington Monument on Sept. 27 2015. Making the phenomenon even more dramatic: a total lunar eclipse also occurred that evening.

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NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/EPA Charon, the largest moon of Pluto, captured by the New Horizons spacecraft on July 13, 2015 from a distance of 290,000 miles

NASA/JPL/Caltech Volunteers using the web-based Milky Way Project brought star-forming features nicknamed "yellowballs" to the attention of researchers, who later showed that they are a phase of massive star formation. The yellow balls -- which are several hundred to thousands times the size of our solar system -- are pictured here in the center of this image of the W33 Star forming region taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, released on Jan. 27, 2015.

NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI New Horizons scientists made this false color image of Pluto using a technique called principal component analysis to highlight the many subtle color differences among Pluto's different regions. The picture was taken from a distance of 22,000 miles on July 14, 2015.

ESA/Hubble/NASA The Twin Jet Nebula, or PN M2-9, is a striking example of a bipolar planetary nebula, formed when the central object is not a single star, but a binary system. An earlier image of the Twin Jet Nebula using data gathered by Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 was released in 1997. This newer version released on Aug. 26, 2015 incorporates more recent observations from the telescope’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph.

John Leyba—Denver Post/ Getty Images The blood moon lunar eclipse sets behind Pikes Peak on April 4, 2015 in Colorado Springs. The reddish hue is the result of Earth moving between the sun and the moon and Earth's atmosphere absorbing blue wavelengths and allowing red ones to pass through.

NASA/JPL—Caltech/MSSS/Texas A&M Univ. NASA's Curiosity Mars rover recorded this view of the sun setting at the close of the mission's 956th Martian day, or sol, on April 15, 2015, from the rover's location in Gale Crater. This was the first sunset observed in color by Curiosity.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/REX Shutterstock The rippled surface of the first Martian sand dune ever studied up close can been seen is this photo taken on Nov. 27, 2015 by NASA Mars Rover Curiosity. The dunes close to Curiosity's current location are part of "Bagnold Dunes," a band along the northwestern flank of Mount Sharp inside the Gale Crater

NASA/JPL/University of Arizona A 3-D computer model (a digital terrain map) of Hale Crater on Mars based on stereo information from two HiRISE observations showing dark, narrow streaks on the Martian slopes that are inferred to be formed by seasonal flow of water on contemporary Mars was released on Sept. 28, 2015.

NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/ Southwest Research Institute This photo shows the new mountain range discovered by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on July 14, 2015 on Pluto, in a heart-shaped region named Tombaugh Regio.

ESA/Hubble/NASA This image released on April 6, 2015, shows the centre of the globular cluster Messier 22, also known as M22, as observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. Globular clusters are spherical collections of densely packed stars, relics of the early years of the Universe, with ages of typically 12 to 13 billion years.

NASA/ESA/Hubble Space Telescope The Hubble Space Telescope revisits one of its most iconic and popular images: the Eagle Nebula’s Pillars of Creation. This image shows the formation as seen in infrared light, which gives the familiar pillars an unfamiliar look. The image was released in January 2015.

Scott Kelly—NASA Moonlight over Italy, as captured by astronaut Scott Kelly aboard the International Space Station on Sept. 23, 2015

Adam Block—Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona Spiral galaxies are delicate and subtle things. This one, NGC 488, is 90 million light years away. The photo was captured at the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter in Arizona and released on Oct. 25, 2015.

NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI This high-resolution image of Pluto was captured by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft and released on Oct. 15, 2015. The bright expanse is the western lobe of the heart-shaped formation informally known as Tombaugh Regio.

NASA/Solar Dynamics Observatory The Sun blew out a coronal mass ejection along with part of a solar filament over a three-hour period on Feb. 24, 2015. While some of the strands fell back into the Sun, a substantial part raced into space in a bright cloud of particles, as observed by the SOHO spacecraft.

Nasa/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/PA Wire This image taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in May 2015 shows Acidalia Planitia, a location on the red planet that was recreated in the film "The Martian."

NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI The Saturnian moon Dione hangs in front of Saturn and its icy rings in this view, captured during the Cassini spacecraft's final close flyby of the icy moon on Aug. 17, 2015.

Cassini Imaging Team/ SSI/JPL/ESA/NASA Saturn's icy moon Enceladus and a small stretch of Saturn's rings, as seen by the Cassini spacecraft on July 29, 2015.

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ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM Comet 67P, photographed by the Rosetta Orbiter from a distance of 79 miles on Nov. 22, 2015

NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this parting view showing the rough and icy crescent of Saturn's moon Dione following the spacecraft's last close flyby on Aug. 17, 2015. The image was captured from a distance of 37,000 to 47,000 miles.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute This photograph, taken by the Cassini spacecraft on March 25, 2015 shows the moons Titan (Saturn’s largest moon), Mimas, and Rhea. Titan appears out of focus in the shot because it’s the only natural satellite that’s currently known to have its own dense atmosphere — clouds hover over the surface, and the atmosphere refracts light and causes the crescent to extend further around the moon than the two other atmosphere-less moons in the photo.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute The Saturnian moon Tethys, dwarfed by Saturn itself and its rings, appears as an elegant crescent in this image taken by NASA's Cassini Spacecraft on on Aug. 18, 2015.

Josep Lago—AFP/Getty Images The moon shines during the Spanish league football match FC Barcelona vs. Malaga CF at the Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona on Aug. 29, 2015.

Animation of CeresThis animation showcases a series of images NASA's Dawn spacecraft took on approach to Ceres on Feb. 4, 2015 at a distance of about 90,000 miles (145,000 kilometers) from the dwarf planet. These latest pictures of Ceres are the sharpest to date, at a resolution of 8.5 miles (14 kilometers) per pixel.

Scott Kelly—NASA A brilliant aurora as seen from the International Space Station on June 27, 2015.

Morning Aurora From the Space StationNASA astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph from the International Space Station on Oct. 7, 2015.

Aurora's Colorful Veil Over EarthNASA astronaut Scott Kelly shared this photograph on social media, taken from the International Space Station on August 15, 2015.

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Kjell Lindgren—NASA Astronaut, Kjell Lindgren captures one last stunning view of the Milky Way before his return to Earth on Dec. 10, 2015

Maxim Shipenkov/EPARussia's Soyuz TMA-19M spacecraft carrying the International Space Station (ISS) Expedition 46/47 crew of Britain's astronaut Tim Peake, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and US astronaut Tim Kopra blasts off from the launch pad at the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome on December 15, 2015.

Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images11.03am (GMT), December 15 from, Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan: Photographers take pictures as Russia’s Soyuz TMA-19M spacecraft carrying the International Space Station crew blasts off from Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan

UPI/Landov / Barcroft Media11.03am (GMT), December 15 from, Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan: The Russian Soyuz TMA-19M rocket is launched.

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Scott Kelly @StationCDRKelly 16/12/2015Soyuz arrived! Great to welcome the rest of our Exp46 crew aboard @space_station today

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Scott Kelly @StationCDRKelly: Day 263. New friends aboard - all settling into their crew quarters.

11.03am (GMT), December 15 from, Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan: Generating 26 million hp of thrust, the Soyuz TMA-19M blasted off towards the International Space Station. oes