Pictures of the year 2009: space
The NASA space shuttle Atlantis is seen in silhouette during solar transit
美國NASA的太空穿梭機亞特蘭蒂斯號，在太陽系中轉時的黑色輪廓剪影被看見
A tiny moon called Epimetheus is seen above Saturn's rings and in front of the larger moon Titan, in this picture captured by NASA's robotic Cassini spacecraft
The large galaxy with well defined spiral structure is NGC 5194. Its arms and dust lanes sweep in front of its companion galaxy, NGC 5195. The pair are about 31 million light-years distant
A galaxy called NGC 1097, which is located 50 million light-years away. The "eye" at the centre of the galaxy is actually a monstrous black hole surrounded by a ring of stars. Image obtained by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope
It looks like a soap bubble, but this is a planetary nebula caused when stars die and blast out a glowing shell of gas and plasma. Known as the "Soap Bubble Nebula", this rare planetary nebula PN G75.5 1.7 was discovered by an amateur astronomer
This image from combined data from the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope shows a pair of colliding galaxies called NGC 6240 in a rare, short-lived phase of their evolution just before they merge into a single, larger galaxy
This image reveals a small region inside the massive globular cluster Omega Centauri, which boasts nearly 10 million stars
This image, taken by the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope, shows stars bursting to life in the chaotic Carina Nebula
The Crab Nebula, one of the most studied objects in the sky. X-ray data from Chandra provide significant clues to the workings of this mighty cosmic "generator," which is producing energy at the rate of 100,000 
An image taken by the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope shows a celestial object that looks like a delicate butterfly
The Cartwheel galaxy as seen by the Galaxy Evolution Explorer's Far Ultraviolet detector, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory
A Hubble false-colour image of glowing gas and dark dust clouds in IC 1795, a star-forming region in the constellation Cassiopeia. Located just over 6,000 light-years away, the complex sprawls along the Perseus spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy
This image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope shows an area in the northwest region of the large Iris Nebula which seems to be clogged with cosmic dust, looking like cotton wool
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