The green and blue regions show where the atmosphere is clear, allowing sunlight to penetrate deep into Uranus. In the yellow and gray regions, a haze or cloud layer is reflecting sunlight away.

The nearby star-forming region around the star R Coronae Australis imaged by the Wide Field Imager (WFI) on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.

This Envisat image shows the island of Elba off Italy’s north western coast.

This view of the dark cloud B68, a so-called Bok globule, is a false-colour composite based on a visible (here rendered as blue), a near-infrared (green) and an infrared (red) image.

The 15-metre Swedish-ESO Submillimeter Telescope (SEST) at ESO's La Silla observing site in the southern part of the Atacama desert of Chile.

The many "personalities" of our great galactic neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, are exposed in this new composite image from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

The Kangerdlugssuaq glacier and its ice stream are pictured in this week’s image, acquired on Sept. 19, 2012 by Landsat-7.

This striking new image, taken with the powerful HAWK-I infrared camera on ESO’s Very Large Telescope at Paranal Observatory in Chile, shows NGC 1365.

The central parts of the starburst galaxy NGC 1313. The very active state of this galaxy is very evident from the image, showing many star formation regions.

This is an almost-true colour composite based on images made with the multi-mode VIMOS instrument on the 8.2-m Melipal (Unit Telescope 3) of ESO's Very Large Telescope.