1. Marmalade Skies
Astronaut Don Pettit recently created this psychedelic scene using a stationary camera aboard the International Space Station, about 240 miles (386 kilometres) above Earth.
The digital composite includes 18 images stacked together to show star trails wheeling through Earth's "airglow" - light spawned by various chemical interactions in the upper atmosphere.
2. Ghostly Eye
A newly released image from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) shows the ultraviolet glow of the Helix nebula, also called NGC 7293.
The object is what's known as a planetary nebula, which is made from the gas and dust left over after a sun-like star dies. The dense core of the star, called a white dwarf, sits at the centre of this eerie cosmic "eye."
3. Glacial Tapestry
Seen in a false-colour NASA satellite picture snapped in 2011, the Columbia glacier (deep blue) flows into a narrow inlet, which leads into Prince William Sound in southeastern Alaska. The region is rimmed by vegetation (green) and exposed bedrock (brown).
The glacier has been rapidly retreating since 1980, according to NASA. Satellite images of the region - including this one - show that between 1986 and 2011, the extent of the ice shrunk by more than 12 miles (20 kilometres).
4. Rings of Andromeda
Blue-white rings create a cosmic bull's eye in this new ultraviolet picture of the Andromeda galaxy, the Milky Way's largest galactic neighbour, which sits about 2.5 million light-years away.
Although the galaxy appears like a familiar spiral in visible light, the ultraviolet view - from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) - shows the ring-like shapes also seen in infrared images.
Astronomers think the rings are evidence that Andromeda collided with another neighbour, the galaxy M32, more than 200 million years ago.
5. Lifting the Veil
Dark clouds drift across a waning gibbous moon on May 10, as seen in a picture snapped from San Jose, California and submitted to National Geographic's Your Shot.
According to photographer Erick Montero, the region was too cloudy for people to see the previous week's supermoon - when the full moon coincided with the lunar orb's closest approach to Earth. But later views of the partially full moon were still "mysterious and surreal," he wrote with his submission.
6. Aurora Falls
A "waterfall" of soft green light drops from the heavens, as seen in a picture taken from the Aurora Sky Station in Abisko, Sweden, that was recently submitted to National Geographic's My Shot.
7. Asteroid Slices
Seen under a polarizing microscope, different minerals appear in a variety of hues in three slices from meteorites - all of which were recently confirmed as parts of the giant asteroid Vesta.
Two of the three space rocks fell to Earth in Antarctica, while the third landed in North Carolina. Their origins were determined based on new data from NASA's Dawn mission, which has been orbiting Vesta since July 2011.
8. Birth Right?
The dusty golden glow of the planetary nebula known as Sharpless 2-71 is seen in a newly released picture from the Gemini North observatory in Hawaii.
Although the nebula was discovered in 1946, astronomers are still debating which star created the complex cloud of dust and gas. Some hold that the bright star at the centre of the object is the one that shed shells of material as it swelled and died, forming the nebula.
But the central star doesn't appear to radiate the right amounts of high-energy light to cause the surrounding gas to glow as intensely as we see today. This led other experts to suspect that a dimmer, bluer star - which does pump out enough high-energy radiation - might be the nebula's true parent.
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