As reported on The Verge.
By Valentina Palladino
NASA tweeted that it created a new album on its Flickr account with a few never-before-seen images of celestial bodies, in conjunction with Sunday’s premiere of Cosmos. Mixed with some old photos, the entire album of 43 images shows how the parts of our universe we don’t see can be amazing, scary, and beautiful all at once. Some of the photos depict phenomena seen on the 13-episode series, which remakes and pays tribute to Carl Sagan’s 1980 program. Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts the show, taking on a part Captain Kirk, part travelogue guide role as he leads viewers on an exploration through our galaxy. The popular astrophysicist is a big supporter of NASA and funding space research, so it’s not surprising that NASA would support and complementCosmos with exclusive photos — and they’re simply too stunning not to share.
Photos and captions courtesy of NASA / CSC / SAO
Hint: Use the ‘s’ and ‘d’ keys to navigate
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ENTER THE VORTEX … IN PSYCHEDELIC COLOR
This false-color image from NASA’s Cassini mission highlights the storms at Saturn’s north pole. The eye of a hurricane-like storm appears dark red; the hexagonal jet stream framing it is a yellowish green; low-lying clouds circling inside appear orange; and the rings of Saturn appear in vivid blue at the top right.
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NASA’S HUBBLE SHOWS MILKY WAY IS DESTINED FOR HEAD-ON COLLISION
This illustration shows a stage in the predicted merger between our Milky Way galaxy and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, as it will unfold over the next several billion years.
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FALSE COLOR VIEW OF MERCURY
This view of Mercury shows not what the planet would look like to the human eye; instead, the colors enhance the chemical, mineralogical, and physical differences between the rocks that make up Mercury’s surface.
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PREVIEW OF A FORTHCOMING SUPERNOVA
NASA’s Hubble Telescope captured an image of the binary star system Eta Carinae. This image consists of ultraviolet and visible light images from the High Resolution Channel of Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys.
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MAGNIFICENT CME ERUPTS ON THE SUN WITH EARTH TO SCALE
On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space. The CME did not travel directly toward Earth, but did connect with Earth’s magnetic environment, causing aurora to appear on the night of Monday, September 3.
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PIPSQUEAK STAR UNLEASHES MONSTER FLARE
An artist depicts the incredibly powerful flare that erupted from the red dwarf star EV Lacertae.
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AURORA OVER WHITEHORSE, YUKON
Swirls of green and red appear in an aurora over Whitehorse, Yukon on the night of September 3, 2012. The aurora was due to a coronal mass ejection from the sun, which erupted on August 31.
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A STAR-FORMATION LABORATORY
The dwarf galaxy NGC 4214 is ablaze with young stars and gas clouds. The galaxy’s close proximity, combined with the wide variety of evolutionary stages among the stars, make it an ideal laboratory to research the triggers of star formation and evolution.
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HUBBLE SEES STARS AND A STRIPE IN CELESTIAL FIREWORKS
This image is a composite of visible, radio, and X-ray data of the full shell of the supernova remnant from SN 1006.
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STARRY-EYED HUBBLE CELEBRATES 20 YEARS OF AWE AND DISCOVERY
This brand new Hubble photo is of a small portion of one of the largest seen star-birth regions in the galaxy, the Carina Nebula. The image captures the top of a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars.