What's that diamond in the sky ? Cruising though space, sometimes you'll come across an unusual object. Such was the case on Friday for ESA 's Rosetta spacecraft on it's way to comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. Robotic Rosetta buzzed right by the main belt asteroid 2867

Where is the best place on Earth to find meteorites ? Although meteors fall all over the world, they usually just sink to the bottom of an ocean , are buried by shifting terrain, or are easily confused with terrestrial rocks . At the bottom of the Earth, however, in East Antarctica , huge sheets of blue ice remain pure and barren. When traversing such a sheet, a dark rock will stick out . These rocks have a high probability of being true meteorites -- likely pieces of another world. An explosion or impact might have catapulted these meteorites from the Moon , Mars , or even an asteroid , yielding valuable information about these distant worlds and our early Solar System . Small teams of snowmobiling explorers so far have found thousands. Pictured above , ice-trekkers search a field 25-kilometers in front of Otway Massif in the Transantarctic Mountain Range during the Antarctic summer of 1995-1996.

In search of planets and the summer Milky Way , astronomer Tun

At first glance, the Helix Nebula ( aka NGC 7293 ), looks simple and round. But this well-studied example of a planetary nebula , produced near the end of the life of a sun-like star, is now understood to have a surprisingly complex geometry . Its extended loops and comet-shaped features have been explored in Hubble Space Telescope images. Still, a 16-inch diameter telescope and camera with broad and narrow band filters was used to create this sharp view of the Helix. The color composite also reveals the nebula's intriguing details, including light-year long, bluegreen radial stripes or spokes that give it the appearance of a cosmic bicycle wheel. The spoke features seem to indicate that the Helix Nebula is itself an old and evolved planetary nebula. The Helix is a mere seven hundred light years from Earth, in the constellation Aquarius .

On July 4th, 2005, the Deep Impact spacecraft directed a probe to impact the nucleus of Comet Tempel 1 . Still cruising through the solar system, earlier this year the robotic spacecraft looked back to record a series of images of its home world 31 million miles (50 million kilometers) away. In a sequence from top left to bottom right, these four frames from the video show a rotating Earth. They combine visible and near-infrared image data with enough resolution and contrast to see clouds, oceans, and continents. They also follow a remarkable transit of Earth by its large, natural satellite, the Moon . The Moon's orbital motion carries it across the field of view from left to right. Imaging the Earth from this distant perspective allows astronomers to connect overall variations in brightness at different wavelengths with planetary features. The observations will aid in the search for earth-like planets in other solar systems .

Astronomers turn detectives when trying to figure out the cause of startling sights like NGC 1316 . Their investigation indicates that NGC 1316 is an enormous elliptical galaxy that started, about 100 million years ago, to devour a smaller spiral galaxy neighbor, NGC 1317, just above it. Supporting evidence includes the dark dust lanes characteristic of a spiral galaxy, and faint swirls of stars and gas visible in this wide and deep image . What remains unexplained are the unusually small globular star clusters , seen as faint dots on the image . Most elliptical galaxies have more and brighter globular clusters than NGC 1316 . Yet the observed globulars are too old to have been created by the recent spiral collision . One hypothesis is that these globulars survive from an even earlier galaxy that was subsumed into NGC 1316 .

Can a gas cloud grab a galaxy? It's not even close. The "claw" of this odd looking "creature" in the above photo is a gas cloud known as a cometary globule . This globule, however, has ruptured. Cometary globules are typically characterized by dusty heads and elongated tails . These features cause cometary globules to have visual similarities to comets, but in reality they are very much different. Globules are frequently the birthplaces of stars, and many show very young stars in their heads. The reason for the rupture in the head of this object is not completely known. The galaxy to the left of the globule is huge, very far in the distance, and only placed near CG4 by chance superposition.

Contrary to the famous myth , you can't see the Great Wall of China from the Moon ... even during a total solar eclipse . But on August 1 you could see the Moon eclipsing the Sun from the Great Wall. In fact, from this location near the Great Wall's western end, the Moon completely blocked the Sun's overwhelming disk revealing a shimmering solar corona and bright planets in the briefly darkened sky. A main pass, The Great Wall's Jiayuguan Fort, is also silhouetted in the foreground. The pass is the western-most of the wall's passes and the best preserved, initially built around 1372 during the Ming dynasty. The nearby city of Jiayuguan in Gansu Province was an important stop on the Silk Road .

What would it be like to stand atop the tallest mountain on Earth? To see a full panoramic vista from there, scroll right. Visible are snow peaked mountains near and far, tremendous cliffs, distant plateaus, the tops of clouds, and a dark blue sky. Mt. Everest stands 8.85 kilometers above sea level, roughly the maximum height reached by international airplane flights, but much less than the 300 kilometers achieved by a space shuttle . Hundreds of people have tried and failed to climb the behemoth by foot, a feat first accomplished successfully in 1953. About 1000 people have now made it to the summit. Roddy Mackenzie, who climbed the mountain in 1989, captured the above image . Mt. Everest lies in the Himalaya mountains in the country of Nepal . In the native language of Nepal, the mountain's name is "Sagarmatha" which means "forehead of the sky."

Giant star forming region W5 is over 200 light-years across and about 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia . W5's sculpted clouds of cold gas and dust seem to form fantastic shapes in this impressive mosaic of infrared images from the Spitzer Space Telescope . In fact, the area on the right includes the structures previously dubbed the Mountains of Creation . New evidence indicates that successive generations of stars formed in the W5 region in an expanding pattern of triggered star formation . The older, earlier generations of stars seem to cluster near the middle of the enormous cavities, with younger stars seen near the rims. Winds and radiation from the older, central stars likely carve out and compress surrounding interstellar material , triggering the collapse that gave rise to younger, later generations of stars farther out. In the false-color image , heated dust still within the cavities appears red, while the youngest stars are forming in the whitish areas. W5 is also known as IC 1848, and together with IC 1805 it is part of a complex region popularly dubbed the Heart and Soul Nebulae .