2025 was a big year for astronomy, marked by major technological milestones and rare celestial events. We got our first look at images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which will forever change how we monitor the night sky. The unexpected arrival of 3I/ATLAS — only the third interstellar object ever detected — turned an armada of telescopes and instruments in its direction. And as the Sun reached the peak of its 11-year cycle of activity, dedicated solar missions seized the moment, capturing our star’s surface from new angles and distances. Here are 16 images from 2025 in chronological order that captured the cosmos — and our imaginations.
Ring around the galaxy
On February 10, 2025, ESA’s Euclid telescope captured this stunning Einstein ring around galaxy NGC 6505. This rare phenomenon occurs when a massive foreground galaxy acts as a gravitational lens, bending and magnifying light from a distant object behind it into a glowing circle. Predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity, these events are produced by the laws of physics and perfect cosmic alignment. Image processing was conducted by J.-C. Cuillandre, G. Anselmi, and T. Li.
Blue Ghost sees its shadow
Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 launched the private firm’s lunar lander on its inaugural journey on Jan. 15, 2025. On March 2, the lander executed a picture-perfect autonomous landing near Mons Latreille on the eastern edge of Mare Crisium — a large, dark volcanic plain on the Moon’s nearside. Shortly after landing, Blue Ghost sent back a stunning image of its own shadow with Earth’s pale blue dot above the lunar horizon.
A star is born, and another
As stars form, they pull in material from their surroundings. But they also spew out jets of gas and dust, as seen in this James Webb Space Telescope image of Lynds 483. Released March 7, this image reveals the dark nebula L483 in unprecedented detail, captured by JWST’s Near-infrared camera (NIRCam). At the center of the jets is a pair of protostars, invisible within a disk of cold gas. They are surrounded by dense dust, which is noticeable by the way it dims the light of stars far behind this system on either side.
The Sun in new detail
On March 9, 2025, the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter captured the widest high-resolution view of the Sun to date. Positioned 48 million miles (77 million km) away, the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) performed a complex maneuver, snapping 200 individual images over four hours. This massive 12,544-pixel mosaic reveals the Sun’s million-degree atmosphere in ultraviolet light, showcasing coronal loops and prominences. Led by the Royal Observatory of Belgium, this international mission provides unprecedented detail of the plasma jets and active regions that define our star’s turbulent atmosphere. View the full resolution image here.
DESI maps the universe
Released March 19, this fan-shaped plot displays the largest 3D map of the universe to date, created by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) to study dark energy. Earth sits at the center, with darker, bluer points representing the most distant objects. DESI is mounted on the NSF Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. This image is a still from an animated video of the full 3D map.
VTF spots sunspots
In April 2025, the U.S. National Science Foundation Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Maui achieved first light with its final instrument, the Visible Tunable Filter (VTF). Developed by Germany’s Institut für Sonnenphysik (KIS), the VTF is the largest spectropolarimeter in the world, located at the most powerful solar telescope in the world. Initial testing, as seen in this image above, produced high-resolution sunspot images where each pixel in the original, full-resolution image corresponds to 6.2 miles (10 km) on the Sun. Full scientific operations for the VTF are scheduled to begin in 2026.
Total artificial eclipse
ESA’s Proba-3 mission successfully executed a feat of formation flying on May 23, creating the first artificial solar eclipse of its kind. By precisely maneuvering two satellites 490 feet (150 meters) apart, the mission’s lead satellite was able to block the Sun’s disk for the secondary craft, allowing the latter to image the faint inner corona. This innovative approach provides a continuous viewing platform for a region previously only observable during fleeting natural eclipses, offering valuable data on the Sun’s atmospher
Purple coronal rain
Released on May 27, 2025, this stunning image from the Goode Solar Telescope reveals the Sun’s corona in supreme detail. Using an adaptive optics system to strip away atmospheric blur, researchers captured a solar prominence and turbulent plasma jets known as spicules. This artificially colorized snapshot, showing hydrogen-alpha light, depicts so-called coronal rain falling toward the surface. It is a still from a 4-minute time-lapse; view the full, high-resolution video and learn more here.
The Sun takes a PUNCH
Preliminary images from NASA’s Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission were unveiled at the 246th American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Anchorage, Alaska. These images, taken on June 3, show coronal mass ejections (CMEs) in unprecedented detail as they raced across the solar system and impacted Earth. View all the images stitched into a video here.
Rubin opens its eyes
On June 23, the first images were released from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Each full image snapped by the observatory’s 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope and 3,200-megapixel LSST Camera would require 400 4K high-definition television screens to display at its original size, according to the observatory. An elliptical galaxy at upper right takes center stage in this portion of a larger image captured of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. View the full image here.
Saying hello to 3I/ATLAS
On July 1, 2025, the NASA-funded ATLAS telescope in Chile discovered 3I/ATLAS, the third known interstellar comet. Arriving from the Sagittarius constellation, the object was tracked 420 million miles away. By analyzing pre-discovery data from various global observatories, scientists traced its path back to mid-June. This animation shows the comet’s initial detection and its journey into our solar system.
The star that died twice
In a study published in Nature Astronomy on July 2, astronomers reported the existence of a star that exploded not once, but twice. This image of SNR 0509-75.5 was taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope’s Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer. This instrument lets astronomers map the distribution of chemical elements. When they examined the image, it showed patterns that confirm its star suffered a pair of explosive blasts.
Gigantic jet seen from ISS
On July 3, 2025, NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers captured a stunning Transient Luminous Event (TLE) from the International Space Station. TLEs are brief electrical discharges occurring far above thunderstorms. While initially mistaken for a sprite — a jellyfish-like flash in the mesosphere — this was a rare gigantic jet. Unlike sprites, which form high above clouds in the upper atmosphere, gigantic jets burst directly from cloud tops to create an electrical bridge from the tops of clouds to around 62 miles (100 km) into the upper atmosphere. Using a Nikon Z9 with a 50mm lens, Ayers captured this rare phenomenon through careful planning and high-speed time-lapse photography in the ISS’s Cupola module.
Infinity Galaxy and beyond
In a paper published July 15 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers uncovered something remarkable in archival imaging from JWST’s COSMOS-Web survey: a pair of colliding disk galaxies whose overlapping rings create a glowing figure-eight, dubbed the Infinity Galaxy. But it’s not just the shape that fascinates astronomers. Nestled between the two galactic cores is a vast cloud of ionized hydrogen gas, stripped of its electrons by a source believed to be a supermassive black hole (SMBH) estimated at roughly a million times the mass of the Sun. If confirmed, this could represent one of the earliest glimpses of an SMBH in formation.
3I/ATLAS seen from Mars
Perhaps the most novel observation of interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS came Oct. 4, when the Perseverance rover spotted the comet with its Mastcam-Z instrument as a faint smudge against the martian sky — the first instance of an interstellar object being imaged from the surface of another world. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
Apep gathers dust
Released Nov. 19, this image from JWST of the Apep binary system reveals four concentric dust shells — three more than previously revealed by images from less powerful telescopes. Named for the Egyptian serpent god of the underworld, this binary system, 8,000 light-years away, features layers of reddish orange carbon dust ejected every 25 years during close stellar passes. Data from JWST and the Very Large Telescope (VLT) confirm a third star — a massive supergiant — is actually carving a hole into the shells. This mid-infrared composite uses color-coding to reveal Apep’s complex, multi-layered architecture.
