'Earth from Space' photo (c) 2000, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

This “The Best…” list is a companion to The Best Sites For Learning About Planets & Space and The Best Sites To Learn About The Hubble Telescope.

I’ve put it together pretty quickly because I wanted to connect it to the Hubble Telescope that my students learned about earlier this week, and we’re going to the computer lab .  Because of that, I’m sure I’ll be adding to it.

I’m including some collections of images taken by the Hubble, but you can go to that “The Best…” list to find more.

Here are my picks for The Best Images Taken In Space:

The Air and Space Smithsonian has a slideshow of what they consider the 50 Best Images Taken From Space.

Milestones In Space Photography comes from National Geographic.

The Boston Globe’s The Big Picture the Best Examples of Astronaut Photography.

Mercury and Messenger are a series of images from The Big Picture.

A Guide to the Cosmos, in Words and Images Dazzling and True is the title of a slideshow from the New York Times showing some fabulous images of space.

Photography On The Final Frontier is a slideshow from National Public Radio of some amazing photos taken from space.

Around The Solar System is an incredible collections of photos by The Boston Globe’s “Big Picture” blog.

Exceptional NASA Pictures is a nice collection of…excellent photos from NASA.

The European Southern Observatory has identified their choices for the top 100 astronomy images.

A Trip Around Our Solar System is a series of photos from The Atlantic.

NASA has created an amazing slideshow of the International Space Station compiling photos taking from a recent Soyuz flight.

Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2011 shortlist – in pictures is from The Guardian.

If you haven’t yet seen this video from a camera attached to the International Space Station, you definitely want to take a look:

 

The Star Wars planet, Martian puppetry, a forbidden star and a falling satellite – in pictures is a photo gallery from The Guardian.

We Are Stardust: Photographs of the Great Beyond is a slideshow from The Atlantic.

Here’s another amazing video taken from The International Space Station:

Planetary Landscapes is a New York Times slideshow.

Wired has a series of fantastic videos shot from the International Space State at night.

 

In 1946 the United States shot a V2 rocket and got this footage:

 

 

A Russian weather satellite has taken one of the most high-resolution images of earth available. Here’s a video of multiple still images stitched together, and you can see a lot, and learn how it’s done, at the Daily Mail.

Here’s an impressive video composed of photos from The International Space Station:

Check out this 3D “Flight Through The Universe” created by the Adler Planetarium, and read more about it here and at YouTube:

 

NASA has released this video of an eruption on the sun:

TIME Magazine has a nice slideshow titled Snapshots of the Heavens: Amazing Astronomy Photos. It contains 2012 winners of the annual contest run by The Royal Observatory.

Here’s a pretty interesting video put together with images taken from the International Space Station:

Most Spectacular Shots From 50 Years of Robotic Solar System Exploration is from Wired.

Astronomy photos of the year is from The Washington Post.

Dynamic Sun: Stunning Three-Year Time-Lapse View is a video from NASA. Here’s how they describe it:

In the three years since it first provided images of the sun in the spring of 2010, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory has had virtually unbroken coverage of the sun’s rise toward solar maximum, the peak of solar activity in its regular 11-year cycle. This video shows those three years of the sun at a pace of two images per day.

They Call It the Penguin: Hubble’s Amazing Photo of Galaxies Colliding is from TIME.

Here’s photo of earth from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft near Saturn . You can see more of NASA’s photos here and read about the mission here.

PIA17171

NASA describes this video as “Canyon of Fire on the Sun.” You can learn more about what that means over at The Atlantic.

From NASA:

In December of 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 became the first people to leave our home planet and travel to another body in space. But as crew members Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders all later recalled, the most important thing they discovered was Earth.

Using photo mosaics and elevation data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), this video commemorates the 45th anniversary of Apollo 8’s historic flight by recreating the moment when the crew first saw and photographed the Earth rising from behind the Moon. Narrator Andrew Chaikin, author of A Man on the Moon, sets the scene for a three-minute visualization of the view from both inside and outside the spacecraft accompanied by the onboard audio of the astronauts.

This is from NASA’s YouTube description of this next video:

February 11, 2015 marks five years in space for NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which provides incredibly detailed images of the whole sun 24 hours a day. Capturing an image more than once per second, SDO has provided an unprecedentedly clear picture of how massive explosions on the sun grow and erupt ever since its launch on Feb. 11, 2010. The imagery is also captivating, allowing one to watch the constant ballet of solar material through the sun’s atmosphere, the corona.

In honor of SDO’s fifth anniversary, NASA has released a video showcasing highlights from the last five years of sun watching. Watch the movie to see giant clouds of solar material hurled out into space, the dance of giant loops hovering in the corona, and huge sunspots growing and shrinking on the sun’s surface.

Wow, NASA strapped a GoPro camera on astronauts doing a space walk.

Here are two videos of it — one a short snippet and the other the entire walk.

Here’s an amazing video from NASA:

A NASA camera aboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite captured a unique view of the moon as it moved in front of the sunlit side of Earth last month. The series of test images shows the fully illuminated “dark side” of the moon that is never visible from Earth.

The images were captured by NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC), a four megapixel CCD camera and telescope on the DSCOVR satellite orbiting 1 million miles from Earth. From its position between the sun and Earth, DSCOVR conducts its primary mission of real-time solar wind monitoring for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Here’s the description of this video:

Motion Designer Christian worked with his brother and Composer Wolfgang for 18 months on this shortfilm. The foundation were thousands original NASA photographies, taken from the Astronauts during the Apollo Missions, which were released in September 2015. It is an animated collage using different techniques to bring the stills to life.

LUNAR from Christian Stangl on Vimeo.

The European Space Agency has just release an amazing interactive map of 1.7 billion stars. You can check it out at here and read more about it at A mesmerizing new atlas of the Milky Way has 1.7 billion stars in it.

NEW VIDEO FROM NASA: “ANIMATION OF SATURN’S NORTHERN AURORAS”

THE FIRST IMAGE OF A BLACK HOLE & A VIDEO SHOWING HOW IT WAS TAKEN

CHECK OUT GOOGLE’S NEW “NASA’S VISUAL UNIVERSE”

This is how NASA describes this new video:

As of June 2020, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory — SDO — has now been watching the Sun non-stop for over a full decade. From its orbit in space around the Earth, SDO has gathered 425 million high-resolution images of the Sun, amassing 20 million gigabytes of data over the past 10 years. This information has enabled countless new discoveries about the workings of our closest star and how it influences the solar system. With a triad of instruments, SDO captures an image of the Sun every 0.75 seconds. The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument alone captures images every 12 seconds at 10 different wavelengths of light.

This 10-year time lapse showcases photos taken at a wavelength of 17.1 nanometers, which is an extreme ultraviolet wavelength that shows the Sun’s outermost atmospheric layer — the corona. Compiling one photo every hour, the movie condenses a decade of the Sun into 61 minutes. The video shows the rise and fall in activity that occurs as part of the Sun’s 11-year solar cycle and notable events, like transiting planets and eruptions. The custom music, titled “Solar Observer,” was composed by musician Lars Leonhard.:

THREE VIDEOS ABOUT THE AMAZING IMAGE OF THE BLACK HOLE AT THE CENTER OF THE MILKY WAY

NASA RELEASES FIRST IMAGE FROM WEBB TELESCOPE

Suggestions and feedback, as always, are welcome.

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