The best space pictures of 2025, from supernovae to moon landings

This two-color sphere is a testament to the rare double supernova explosion, captured by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile.

Astronomers at the University of New South Wales in Canberra, Australia, believe the spectacular ball of gas and dust formed when a white dwarf star that may once have been similar to our Sun but has long since run out of nuclear fuel exploded after siphoning off helium from another star. The initial explosion occurred about 300 years ago and would have been one of the brightest objects in the night sky of the southern hemisphere if the Sun had not blocked view from Earth.

It's been a controversial year for SpaceX's spacecraft, the world's largest and most powerful rocket that CEO Elon Musk hopes will eventually take astronauts to Mars. While the rocket had successful orbital test flight in August, the previous three launch attempts were failures, ending in fiery explosions (or “quick unscheduled showdowns,” as SpaceX calls them). James Temple, a chef who works on a yacht near the Turks and Caicos Islands, caught a kaleidoscope stripes of Starship's seventh failed flight test when it burned up in the sky in January.

Beyond Starship, SpaceX has had a successful year in other areas as well, continuing to fly astronauts to and from the International Space Station in the absence of a suitable NASA rocket. This photograph captures the moment when The SpaceX Dragon capsule splashed down next to the dolphin capsule. The ship was carrying two NASA astronauts who were “stranded” on the ISS for nine months after Boeing's Starliner spacecraft was deemed unsafe to return them as planned.

In March, Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander became just second commercial spacecraft to land on the Moonand the first to do so in an upright position after the previous attempt fell on landing. After a 45-day journey, he landed in a smooth volcanic pool called Mare Crisium, where he took this selfie of his own shadow against the sunlight, with the Earth a small dot in the sky above him.

The Vera K. Rubin Observatory, one of the most powerful telescopes in the world, began operation this year and will scan the night sky daily for the next decade. One of the first images showed The Trifid Nebula, a star-forming region in the Milky Way about 5,000 light-years away, appears as a pink-blue cloud in the upper right corner of the image. The pink swirl below is the Lagoon Nebula, another stellar nursery located 4,000 light-years away. This image was created from 678 different photographs taken by Rubin over 7 hours.

Astronomers have been waiting impatiently lunar eclipse in Septemberwhen the Moon passed through the Earth's shadow. This gave it its characteristic red color for reasons similar to why sunsets appear red, due to the diffraction of light passing through the Earth's atmosphere and hitting the Moon. This composite photograph shows the sequential appearance of the Moon as it moves across the night sky over Tokyo.