NASA has uploaded thousands of amazing space photos, 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 $400million 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.
‘The spectacular new data just released remind us that we have many new neighbours,’ said Pete Schultz, a space scientist at Brown University.
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.