No collection of great astronomy photos is complete without this one. In 1990 the spacecraft Voyager 1, having finished its main mission and now hurtling out past the edge of the Solar System into empty space, spun its camera back behind it to view the Earth from over 6 billion kilometres away. This is the picture it took:
The Pale Blue Dot - Earth in a beam of scattered sunlight reflected off Voyager
I won’t attempt to say this better than Carl Sagan famously did:
This 1995 picture is one of the most famous images take by the Hubble telescope, and rightly so: the aptly-named Pillars of Creation.
The Pillars of Creation
These enormous pillars (the image is about five light-years to a side!) are clouds of molecular hydrogen gas and dust protruding from a gas cloud in the Eagle Nebula. The nebula is a region of star-formation, and one of its hot, massive newly-born stars (somewhere off the top edge of this picture) is bombarding the clouds with intense ultra-violent light. That light has literally carved the pillars you can see here by boiling away huge volumes of gas and leaving only the denser parts behind. The dense pillars themselves contain another generation of forming stars, hence the name.
