8 – Eye of Saturn
Taking a trip back to Saturn and Cassini, we see this incredible image of the Eye of Saturn. The rings get all the attention, but this is another cool feature: at Saturn’s north pole is hexagonal vortex in the thick atmosphere. This structure is over 25,000 kilometers across, and at the center is a swirling circular storm that you see pictured here. The Eye of Saturn is by itself some 2,000 kilometers across, but has never been imaged in such high detail before. You can actually see massive storm clouds rising out of the atmosphere.
9 – NASA HiRISE spies curiosity
As the Curiosity rover was landing on Mars to take self portraits and do science, something really cool happened. From millions of miles away, NASA took a picture of Curiosity. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was on the scene with its HiRISE camera, and when Curiosity deployed its parachute, NASA knew where to look. A robot orbiting another planet was used to take a picture of another robot landing on that planet. Just think about how amazing it is that this image even exists.
10 – New Hubble Deep Field
Early in Hubble’s run, it was used to produce the so-called Deep Field image. This was a frame so chock-full of galaxies it would make your head spin. Now NASA has generated a new version of this image called the the Hubble Extreme Deep Field, which was created from 2000 snapshots of a seemingly empty patch of sky over the course of 23 days. Every swirl, every smudge, every pixel, and every point of light in this image is an entire galaxy. Think about that. Billions and billions of stars compressed to a single pixel in an image taken by highly-evolved apes on an unremarkable blue planet on the outer rim of a run-of-the-mill galaxy.
It all makes the universe seem like an impossibly big place. But in 2012, we learned a little more about what’s out there. Let’s hope we keep on learning in 2013.