NASA and ESA best space pictures

The two great space American and European agencies (NASA and ESA) are the most active sources of top-quality space images. Even better, most of their published pictures are available nearly without constraint (at least for non-commercial uses). So, you no longer need to bring your telescope and your photo camera to see the deep end of space.

On the one hand, the European Space Agency (ESA) opens on its web site a presentation of its best pictures in a photo (and video) gallery where I grabbed this superb view of the East coast of Greenland.

Greenland’s East coast (Photo: ESA)

On the other hand, here is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which already had a web site of the same kind, just opening a Flickr group to distribute some of its archive images coming back from the oldest sources like this solar eclipse photographed from the Apollo 12 mission.

Apollo 12 view of Solar Eclipse - Photo: NASA Johnson Space Center Collection

Not willing to stay behind while they have a real treasure of exceptionally good pictures of the remotest stars, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) now has a Top 100 of pictures taken by the observatory telescopes. Like this photo of Centaurus A, a great galaxy stopped in her rotation by seevral ESO cameras in various light spectrums (visible light, X-ray, etc.)

Photo: ESO/WFI (Optical); MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al. (Submillimetre); NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al. (X-ray)