IT'S Australia by night - warts and all. Bushfires in the Outback are among a new set of NASA images showing nature's fire and ice.

A new set of images from NASA, released to mark the festive season and the New Year, celebrates the fire and ice, violence and serenity that makes up the universe we live in.

The NASA Earth Observatory image below shows the night lights of Australia as observed by the Suomi NPP satellite in April and October 2012. The composite image includes man-made light sources and the visible light of bushfires. The data were acquired over nine days in April 2012 and thirteen days in October 2012, and it took the satellite 312 orbits and 2.5 terabytes of data to get a clear shot of every parcel of Earths land surface.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has delivered a view of Saturn taken while the spacecraft was in Saturn's shadow. The cameras were turned toward Saturn and the sun so that the planet and rings are backlit. In addition to the visual splendor, this special, very-high-phase viewing geometry lets scientists study ring and atmosphere phenomena not easily seen at a lower phase. Also captured in this image are two of Saturn's moons: Enceladus and Tethys. Both appear on the left side of the planet, below the rings. Enceladus is closer to the rings; Tethys is below and to the left. Images taken using infrared, red and violet spectral filters were combined to create this enhanced-color view.

NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this natural-color image below of the arrival of winter in parts of the US Pacific Northwest and Colorado. Showing more distinct contours than the clouds, the snow cover stretched across the Rocky Mountains and the surrounding region, from Idaho to Arizona and from California to Colorado. In time for the 2012 winter solstice, a storm dropped snow over most of the Rocky Mountains in the United States. Snow depths exceeded100 centimeters in some places.

The Hubble Space Telescope has photographed a nearby planetary nebula called NGC 5189. The intricate structure of this bright gaseous nebula resembles a glass-blown holiday ornament with a glowing ribbon entwined. Planetary nebulae represent the final brief stage in the life of a medium-sized star like our sun. While consuming the last of the fuel in its core, the dying star expels a large portion of its outer envelope. This material then becomes heated by the radiation from the stellar remnant and radiates, producing glowing clouds of gas that can show complex structures, as the ejection of mass from the star is uneven in both time and direction.

A Hubble Space Telescope shows NGC 6388, a dynamically middle-aged globular cluster in the Milky Way. While the cluster formed in the distant past (like all globular clusters, it is over ten billion years old), a study of the distribution of bright blue stars within the cluster shows that it has aged at a moderate speed, and its heaviest stars are in the process of migrating to the centre. A new study using Hubble data has discovered that globular clusters of the same age can have dramatically different distributions of blue straggler stars within them, suggesting that clusters can age at substantially different rates.