Space photo of the week — Extraordinary images of our sublime universe

The massive star-forming complex known as the Lobster Nebula is part of the biggest infrared map of the Milky Way galaxy ever created.

A new image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows Arp 107, home to two merging galaxies, with two bright cores and a "bridge" of dust and gas forming a cosmic smiley face.

SpaceX Polaris Dawn astronaut Jared Isaacman briefly "touched the void" as he embarked on the first-ever private spacewalk Thursday (Sept. 12).

The Very Large Telescope in northern Chile imaged a "super-Jupiter" exoplanet called 2M1207b, precisely 20 years ago this week. This was the first direct visual confirmation of a world beyond our solar system.

NGC 6744 is a spiral galaxy bigger than, but otherwise very similar to, our own. NASA has dubbed the large spiral galaxy the Milky Way’s ‘big brother’.

Voyager 2, NASA's longest-running mission, explored Neptune during a historic encounter on Aug. 25, 1989, sending back humanity's first close-ups of the planet.

A new image of the Serpens Nebula captured by the James Webb Space Telescope shows that when clouds collapse to form stars, all of those stars spin in the same direction.

This stunning image of dune fields near Mars' north polar ice cap, taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, showcases the impact of polar winds on the Red Planet's landscape.

The Hubble Space Telescope zooms in on a dense ball of millions of stars within a galaxy orbiting the Milky Way. Its ancient origins raise big questions about how galaxies form and grow.

Command module pilot Michael Collins took this iconic Apollo 11 photo 55 years ago today, after his historic trip around the far side of the moon made him "the world's loneliest man".