You'll go starry-eyed at Nasa’s latest mission success - because the space agency has uploaded thousands of amazing space snaps onto the internet, including shots of previously unseen galaxies, stars and asteroids.
The colossal gallery – available to anyone with a connection to the web - was taken by Nasa’s super hi-tech sky-mapping telescope.
It took a staggering two and a half million pictures of the universe, which include 33,000 new asteroids found floating between Mars and Jupiter – and 20 comets.
Since 2009 the £200million infrared telescope, called the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has been scanning the cosmos with the most sophisticated cameras ever deployed in space.
Its lenses can pick up heat glow, so are able to find dusty, cold and distant objects that are invisible to normal telescopes.
Among the eye-opening images released by Nasa is one of the Comet Siding Spring, seen streaking across the sky with a ghostly trail and the gigantic Andromeda galaxy, which lies 2.5million light-years from Earth. WISE also snapped the stunning rose-shaped Berkeley 59 cluster of young stars, burning away in their stellar nursery.
‘The spectacular new data just released remind us that we have many new neighbours,’ said Pete Schultz, a space scientist at Brown University.
So far, Nasa has released just half of the images that WISE took and plans to upload many more in the near future. WISE ran out of coolant in October, making it unable to chill its heat-sensitive instruments and observe faraway objects.
So instead it has taken up sentry duties and will spend the next four months peering into the space around Earth for potentially threatening asteroids and comets.
To see the images, log on to www.nasa.gov/wise.
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