WISE Up: Space Photos from NASA's Sky-Mapping Telescope

Prolific NASA Sky-Mapper Finds 25,000 Hidden Asteroids

This image shows the famous Pleiades cluster of stars as seen through the eyes of WISE, or NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. The mosaic contains a few hundred image frames - just a fraction of the more than one million WISE captured during its first complete survey of the sky in infrared light.

New Cosmic Photo Reveals Eye-Catching Rosette Nebula

A new image taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) shows the Rosette nebula located within the constellation Monoceros (the Unicorn). This flower-shaped nebula is a huge star-forming cloud of dust and gas in our Milky Way galaxy, about 4,500-5,000 light-years away.

Misfit Failed Star Is Stinky, Cold and Glowing Green

The green dot in the middle of this image is a dim star belonging to a class called brown dwarfs. NASA's WISE spacecraft snapped the image in infrared light.

Cosmic Nebulas Dazzle in New Space Telescope Photos

An image of the Flaming Star Nebula, taken in infrared light by NASA's WISE space telescope.

Runaway Star Zeta Ophiuchi

This infrared image from NASA's WISE telescope shows the runaway star Zeta Ophiuchi as it creates a bright shockwave (yellow arc) in an interstellar dust cloud as it zooms through space.

NASA Telescope Spots Cosmic Rose in Deep Space

This infrared image from NASA's WISE space telescope shows a cosmic rosebud blossoming with new stars, including the Berkeley 59 cluster and a supernova remnant. Read the full story.

The Streak

This gallery showcases the first images taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft. Comet Siding Spring flashes across the sky impressively in this infrared image. Observers in Australia discovered the comet, also known as C/2007 Q3, in 2007.

Just Born

This infrared image shows a star-forming cloud teeming with gas, dust and massive newborn stars. The inset shows detail of the very center of the cloud, a cluster of stars called NGC 3603 (taken in visible light by the Hubble Space Telescope).

The Galaxy Next Door

Our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, also goes by the names Messier 31 or M31. Here, it is captured in full in this new image by WISE.

Andromeda Strained

This image from WISE displays the Andromeda galaxy's older stellar population in blue. The disk of the galaxy shows the aftermath of a collision with another galaxy, clear from the warp in the spiral arm at the upper left side.