In just 10 Earth years of operation, NASA’s Galactic Evolution Explorer, or GALEX, looked into more than 10 billion years of cosmic time. It saw hundreds of millions of galaxies, and it greatly expanded our understanding of the evolution of the universe. Thanks to this incredible breadth of work, it managed to give us some of the most stunning and important pictures of the cosmos despite being designed to see into areas of the spectrum that normally keep photos from being pleasing to the human eye. GALEX’s ultraviolet camera produced images and datasets that are striking all on their own, and others that could be combined with visible-spectrum images to show the shape of our universe in unprecedented detail, an accuracy no one observer could capture.

GALEX showed us galaxies in their infant, adolescent, adult, and elderly stages. It showed us some galaxies in mid-collision, and others on the brink of a natural death. Its ultraviolet eye also provided insight into fast-moving stars and black holes, letting scientists see a whole new slice of the light given off by incomprehensibly awesome events, many of which occurred before the formation of the Earth itself. It’s given insight into everything from galactic birth to the nature of dark energy.

Below are just a few images collected in tribute to the full lifetime of NASA’s GALEX space telescope.

GALEX herself

GALEX sported a 50-centimeter primary aperture, in a Richey-Chretien f/6 configuration. The camera could see wavelengths between 135 and 280nm, well below the lower bound of visible light, which begins around 380nm. It’s 1.2-degree field of view was wide enough to let it see whole clusters of galaxies. The solar cells which dominate this picture could provide GALEX with almost 300 watts of power. This space telescope roamed the skies above earth from April 28, 2003 to June 28, 2013.

Mira’s unbelievable tail

The star Mira was discovered more than 400 years ago, but it took an eye like GALEX to see its most stunning feature: a comet-like tail more than 13 light years in length (top half) It was formed over tens of thousands of years, and is totally invisible in the visible portion of the light spectrum (bottom half). Like a comet’s tail, this incredible, unique cosmological feature is now known to be made of up of the stripped constituents of the star itself.

Next page: A galactic collision, and the Cartwheel galaxy