The Earth, in all its majesty and its tragedy, is the subject of images taken aboard the International Space Station. This image of the Carr and Ferguson fires was captured by European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst (@Astro_Alex), on August 3, 2018, from the station. "California burning. These fires are frightening to watch, even from space. Here's a shout-out from space to all firefighters on this planet, my former colleagues. Stay safe my friends!" Gerst, a geophysicist and volcanologist, wrote on his Twitter account.

Taken on August 22, 2018.

Malta's famous Azure Window rock arch has collapsed into the sea after heavy storms. Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said the news was "heartbreaking". A study in 2013 said that while erosion was inevitable, the structure was not in imminent danger of collapsing, the Times of Malta reports.

What's happened to our Sun? Nothing very unusual -- it just threw a filament. Toward the middle of 2012, a long standing solar filament suddenly erupted into space producing an energetic Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). The filament had been held up for days by the Sun's ever changing magnetic field and the timing of the eruption was unexpected. Watched closely by the Sun-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory, the resulting explosion shot electrons and ions into the Solar System, some of which arrived at Earth three days later and impacted Earth's magnetosphere.

Kast was searching for clear skies in Finnish Lapland to capture the beauty of a polar night when he encountered these polar stratospheric clouds.

That's not a young crescent Moon poised above the hills along the western horizon at sunset. It's Venus in a crescent phase. About 54 million kilometers away and less than 20 percent illuminated, it was captured by telescope and camera on September 30 near Bacau, Romania. The bright celestial beacon is now languishing in the evening twilight, its days as the Evening Star in 2018 coming to a close. But it also grows larger in apparent size and becomes an ever thinner crescent in telescopic views.

On August 23, 2018 the identification and distribution of aerosols in the Earth's atmosphere is shown in this dramatic, planet-wide visualization. Produced in real time, the Goddard Earth Observing System Forward Processing (GEOS FP) model relies on a combination of Earth-observing satellite and ground-based data to calculate the presence of types of aerosols, tiny solid particles and liquid droplets, as they circulate above the entire planet. This August 23rd model shows black carbon particles in red from combustion processes, like smoke from the fires in the United States and Canada, spreading across large stretches of North America.

First came the trees. In the town of Salamanca, Spain, the photographer noticed how distinctive a grove of oak trees looked after being pruned. Next came the galaxy.

by Paranyu Pithayarungsarit

Ngerukewid, also known as the "Seventy Islands", an unhabitated protected marine sanctuary off limits to anyone.

After a more than nine-year, three-billion-mile journey to Pluto, it’s show time for NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, as the flyby sequence of science observations is officially underway. In the early morning hours of July 8, mission scientists received this new view of Pluto—the most detailed yet returned by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) aboard New Horizons. The image was taken on July 7, when the spacecraft was just under 5 million miles (8 million kilometers) from Pluto.

School children walk as Mount Sinabung erupts in Karo, North Sumatra, Indonesia. Feb.19,2018

J.Otto Szatmari

Uluru. Needs no explanation. Truly difficult to capture the massiveness of this sandstone formation. Every cleft and imperfection has cultural/"Dreamtime" significance. Unfortunately, the bush flies kept me from staying longer. You can see the smoke from controlled spinifex burnings begins the rock. You can see in the middle, a group of people walking on top. Picking up some Aboriginal hitchhikers, their first question was if I had climbed it.

An absolute epic night of astro and Aurora.

A handout photo released by the European Space Agency on Feb. 2, 2017, shows a perspective view of the Mars north polar ice cap and its distinctive dark troughs forming a spiral-like pattern.