TIME chooses best space photographs of 2015

TIME magazine has chosen 56 best space photographs of 2015, almost all of them taken by the American government agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), throughout the year.

The top photo is the Twin Jet Nebula, or PN M2-9, which is an example of a bipolar planetary nebula formed when the central object is not a single star but a binary system. This photograph was taken on August 26 using the Space Telescope Imaging Spectograph.

This photo (below), taken on June 23, is Circinus X-1, an X-ray binary star known for its variability. Within the system, a dense neutron star, the collapsed remnant of a supernova explosion, orbits with an ‘ordinary’ stellar companion Circinus X-1 30, which is 700 light years away.

This photo, taken on September 23, is moonlight over Italy, captured by astronaut Scott Kelly on the International Space Station.

This solar flare, taken on February 24 from the SOHO spacecraft, is called a coronal mass ejection. It was taken over a three-hour period. Some of the solar filament strands fell back into the Sun, but a substantial part headed for space in a bright cloud of particles.

http://time.com/4130093/best-space-photos-2015/?xid=homepage

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