All year long (well, since February), we have been collecting the most spectacular images of planets, moons, galaxies, and nebulas for our Wired Science Space Photo of the Day. The gallery, which now has more than 240 pictures, has proven more popular than we ever imagined and even resulted in the creation of the most epic soundtrack in the universe. This year has seen some amazing space photos, including gloriously shining dust in the Orion nebula, Saturn wreathed in rings and accompanied by its moon Titan, spectacular shots of Earth’s Arctic region, and an artful dust devil on Mars. Here we present our favorite shots taken in 2012 that show off the wonder and unbounded beauty of the cosmos. Above: May 2: Dust in Orion This image of the region surrounding the reflection nebula Messier 78, just to the north of Orion’s belt, shows clouds of cosmic dust threaded through the nebula like a string of pearls. The submillimeter-wavelength observations, made with the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope and shown here in orange, use the heat glow of interstellar dust grains to show astronomers where new stars are being formed. They are overlaid on a view of the region in visible light. Image: ESO/APEX (MPIfR/ESO/OSO)/T. Stanke et al./Igor Chekalin/Digitized Sky Survey 2 [high-resolution] Caption: ESO

Oct. 18: Anyone Else Think This Looks Like the Cookie Monster? Ok, so maybe it's just me. But the superposition of younger craters on older craters (in this case two smaller craters upon the rim of an older crater) can result in landforms that appear to resemble more familiar shapes to human eyes. More generally, the Law of Superposition allows scientists to determine which surface features pre- and postdate others, leading to a better understanding of the geological history of different regions of Mercury's surface. Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington [high-resolution] Caption: Mercury Messenger Team

Sept. 27: The Cosmic Seagull This new image from ESO’s La Silla Observatory shows part of a stellar nursery nicknamed the Seagull Nebula. This cloud of gas, formally called Sharpless 2-292, seems to form the head of the seagull and glows brightly due to the energetic radiation from a very hot young star lurking at its heart. The detailed view was produced by the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope. Nebulas are among the most visually impressive objects in the night sky. They are interstellar clouds of dust, molecules, hydrogen, helium and other ionized gases where new stars are being born. Although they come in different shapes and colors many share a common characteristic: When observed for the first time, their odd and evocative shapes trigger astronomers’ imaginations and lead to curious names. This dramatic region of star formation, which has acquired the nickname of the Seagull Nebula, is no exception. This new image from the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile shows the head part of the Seagull Nebula. It is just one part of the larger nebula known more formally as IC 2177, which spreads its wings with a span of over 100 light-years and resembles a seagull in flight. This cloud of gas and dust is located about 3,700 light-years away from Earth. The entire bird shows up best in wide-field images. The Seagull Nebula lies just on the border between the constellations of Monoceros (The Unicorn) and Canis Major (The Great Dog) and is close to Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. The nebula lies more than four hundred times further away than the famous star. The complex of gas and dust that forms the head of the seagull glows brightly in the sky due to the strong ultraviolet radiation coming mostly from one brilliant young star — HD 53367 — that can be spotted in the center of the image and could be taken to be the seagull’s eye. The radiation from the young stars causes the surrounding hydrogen gas to glow with a rich red color and become an HII region [3]. Light from the hot blue-white stars is also scattered off the tiny dust particles in the nebula to create a contrasting blue haze in some parts of the picture. Although a small bright clump in the Seagull Nebula complex was observed for the first time by the German-British astronomer Sir William Herschel back in 1785, the part shown here had to await photographic discovery about a century later. Image: ESO [high-resolution] Caption: ESO

Oct. 6: Cubesat Release Several tiny satellites are featured in this image photographed by an Expedition 33 crew member on the International Space Station. The satellites were released outside the Kibo laboratory using a Small Satellite Orbital Deployer attached to the Japanese module's robotic arm on Oct. 4, 2012. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Aki Hoshide, flight engineer, set up the satellite deployment gear inside the lab and placed it in the Kibo airlock. The Japanese robotic arm then grappled the deployment system and its satellites from the airlock for deployment. A portion of the station's solar array panels and a blue and white part of Earth provide the backdrop for the scene. Image: NASA [high-resolution] Caption: NASA

Apr. 9: Elephant on Mars This observation highlights terrain that looks like an elephant. This is a good example of the phenomena "pareidolia," where we see things (such as animals) that aren't really there. Actually, this image covers the margin of a lava flow in Elysium Planitia, the youngest flood-lava province on Mars. Flood lavas cover extensive areas, and were once thought to be emplaced extremely rapidly, like a flood of water. Most lava floods on Earth are emplaced over years to decades, and this is probably true for much of the lava on Mars as well. An elephant can walk away from the slowly advancing flow front. However, there is also evidence for much more rapidly flowing lava on Mars, a true flood of lava. In this instance, maybe this elephant couldn't run away fast enough. Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona [high-resolution] Caption: Alfred McEwen

Dec. 11: Evaporating Rocks on Mercury The bright material on the floor of Kertész crater is not the water ice recently confirmed to be in craters near Mercury's poles, but it might well be behaving as ice would on another planet. Mercury's daytime temperatures are so hot at most latitudes that rocks that would be stable at other places in the Solar System may essentially evaporate on Mercury. That is one theory for the formation of these bright, irregular features known as hollows seen here and in many other craters on Mercury. This image was acquired as a high-resolution targeted observation. Targeted observations are images of a small area on Mercury's surface at resolutions much higher than the 200-meter/pixel morphology base map. It is not possible to cover all of Mercury's surface at this high resolution, but typically several areas of high scientific interest are imaged in this mode each week. Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington [high-resolution] Caption: Mercury MESSENGER Team

July 2: Green Flames The Flame Nebula sits on the eastern hip of Orion the Hunter, a constellation most easily visible in the northern hemisphere during winter evenings. This view of the Flame nebula from WISE, NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, shows an expanded view over one previously released of this enormous space cloud (http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/gallery_FlameNebula.html). The previous image was made from data WISE collected after its coolant began to run out, when only three of WISE’s infrared bands were in operation. The flame nebula is a very infrared-bright region, and the reduced sensitivity during the 3-band phase of the WISE mission worked to the advantage of astronomers interested in studying the brightest parts of this region without so much glare. This new image includes more data collected from all of WISE’s four infrared bands. This view takes in a vast cloud of gas and dust where new stars are being born. Three familiar nebulas are visible in the central region: the Flame nebula, the Horsehead nebula, and NGC 2023. The Flame is the brightest and largest in the image. It is being lit up by a star inside it that is 20 times the mass of the sun and would be as bright to our eyes as the other stars in Orion’s belt if it weren’t for all the surrounding dust, which makes it appear 4 billion times dimmer than it really is. NGC 2023 is the bright knot below the Flame. The famous Horsehead nebula is visible poking out of the edge of the cloud, just to the right of NGC 2023 and down a touch. It takes on a very different view in infrared compared to visible light. In visible light, the horse’s head is a silhouetted dark cloud in front of glowing gas. But here, we see the dust in that dark cloud glowing in infrared light. Two of the three stars in Orion’s belt are visible in this image, but despite their prominence to our eyes in the night sky, they are somewhat unremarkable as seen by WISE. Alnitak, the far left star in Orion’s belt, is a multiple blue-giant star system located 736 light-years away. In this image, it is located just to the right of the central part of the Flame nebula. Alnilam, the middle star of Orion’s belt, is a variable blue supergiant, located 1,980 light-years away. Despite having a radius 24 times bigger than the sun, and luminosity 275,000 times greater than the sun, it only appears as a moderately bright star near the upper right corner of this image. Another noteworthy feature in this image is the bright red arc at the lower right. This arc surrounds the star sigma Orionis, the upper star in the sword of Orion, which hangs from his belt. It is a blue dwarf multiple star system, located 1,070 light-years away. It is moving through space at a breathtaking speed of 5,260,000 mph (2,400 kilometers per second). At that speed, winds from the star system crash into the gas and dust outside the system and create a bow shock, where material in front of the speeding Sigma Orionis system is piling up. The energy from the bow shock heats up dust in the region and makes it glow in infrared. Color in this image represents specific infrared wavelengths. Blue represents light emitted at 3.4-micron wavelengths, and cyan (blue-green) represents 4.6-microns, both of which come mainly from hot stars. Relatively cooler objects, such as the dust of the nebulae, appear green and red. Green represents 12-micron light and red represents 22-micron light. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech [high-resolution] Caption: NASA

Aug. 1: Blue Dunes of Mars HiRISE has been carrying out a dedicated survey of sand dunes on Mars, determining whether and how fast the dunes move by observing repeatedly at intervals of Martian years. More than 60 sites have been monitored so far, showing that sand dunes from the equator to the poles are advancing at rates of up to 1 meter per Martian year. These observations are still spotty, however, and tend to be concentrated in the tropics and the North Polar erg (the sand sea that surrounds the North Pole). One latitude band that had not been sampled at all lies between 30 and 65 degrees north. This observation is among a set of images acquired to fill that gap. This image shows a variety of different dune types in southern Lyot Crater in the Northern lowlands at 48.9 degrees north. Transverse dunes to the west grade into longitudinal dunes downwind to the east and barchans to the south, possibly because of local winds channeled by topography in the impact basin. This image was intended to match the approximate illumination and viewing conditions of an earlier HiRISE observation that was made two Martian years earlier, in August 2008. Detailed comparison of the two images shows movement on many of the dunes during this interval of nearly four Earth years. Other images also show dune activity in this latitude band, adding to a growing suspicion that dunes are on the move everywhere on Mars, faster in some places than others. Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona [high-resolution] Caption: Paul Geissler

May 15: It's Full of Stars This is a composite of a series of images photographed from a mounted camera on the Earth-orbiting International Space Station, from approximately 240 miles above Earth. Space station hardware in the foreground includes the Mini-Research Module (MRM1, center) and a Russian Progress vehicle docked to the Pirs Docking Compartment (right). Expedition 31 Flight Engineer Don Pettit relayed some information about photographic techniques used to achieve the images: "My star trail images are made by taking a time exposure of about 10 to 15 minutes. However, with modern digital cameras, 30 seconds is about the longest exposure possible, due to electronic detector noise effectively snowing out the image. To achieve the longer exposures I do what many amateur astronomers do. I take multiple 30-second exposures, then 'stack' them using imaging software, thus producing the longer exposure." A total of 47 images photographed by the astronaut-monitored stationary camera were combined to create this composite. . Image: NASA/Don Pettit [high-resolution] Caption: NASA

June 19: Beautiful Arctic Fifteen orbits of the recently launched Suomi NPP satellite provided the VIIRS instrument enough time (and longitude) to gather the pixels for this synthesized view of Earth showing the Arctic, Europe, and Asia. Suomi NPP orbits the Earth about 14 times each day and observes nearly the entire surface. The NPP satellite continues key data records that are critical for climate change science. Image: NASA/GSFC [high-resolution] Caption: NASA

Dec. 18: Planetary Nebula Ornament The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope celebrates the holiday season with a striking image of the planetary nebula NGC 5189. The intricate structure of the stellar eruption looks like a giant and brightly coloured ribbon in space. Image: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) [high-resolution] Caption: Hubble Heritage team

Mar. 12: Devil on Mars A towering dust devil casts a serpentine shadow over the Martian surface in this stunning, late springtime image of Amazonis Planitia. The length of the shadow indicates that the dust plume reaches more than 800 meters, or half a mile, in height. The tail of the plume does not trace the path of the dust devil, which had been following a steady course towards the southeast and left a bright track behind it. The delicate arc in the plume was produced by a westerly breeze at about a 250-meter height that blew the top of the plume towards the east. The westerly winds and the draw of warmth to the south combine to guide dust devils along southeast trending paths, as indicated by the tracks of many previous dust-devils. The dust plume itself is about 30 meters in diameter. Numerous bright tracks trend from northwest to southeast. It is interesting to see that these tracks are bright, whereas dust-devil tracks elsewhere on Mars are usually dark. Dark tracks are believed to form where bright dust is lifted from the surface by dust devils, revealing a darker substrate. Here in Amazonis, the dust cover is too thick to be penetrated by such scouring. A blanket of bright dust was deposited over this region recently, just before the arrival of MRO, so the surface dust here can still be moved. Perhaps the bright tracks form when the settled dust is stirred up by the strong winds generated by the dust devils (tangential wind speeds of up to 70 miles per hour have been recorded in HiRISE images of other dust devils). It's also interesting that this image was taken during the time of year when Mars is farthest from the Sun. Just as on Earth, Martian winds are powered by solar heating. Exposure to the sun's rays should be at a minimum during this season, yet even now, dust devils act relentlessly to clean the surface of freshly deposited dust, a little at a time. Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona [high-resolution] Caption: Paul Geissler

Sept. 14: Mickey on Mercury This scene is to the northwest of the recently named crater Magritte, in Mercury's south. The image is not map projected; the larger crater actually sits to the north of the two smaller ones. The shadowing helps define the striking "Mickey Mouse" resemblance, created by the accumulation of craters over Mercury's long geologic history. This image was acquired as part of MDIS's high-incidence-angle base map. The high-incidence-angle base map is a major mapping activity in MESSENGER's extended mission and complements the surface morphology base map of MESSENGER's primary mission that was acquired under generally more moderate incidence angles. High incidence angles, achieved when the Sun is near the horizon, result in long shadows that accentuate the small-scale topography of geologic features. The high-incidence-angle base map is being acquired with an average resolution of 200 meters/pixel. Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington [high-resolution] Caption: Mercury Messenger Team

July 23: Rainbow Orion This new view of the Orion nebula highlights fledgling stars hidden in the gas and clouds. It shows infrared observations taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Herschel mission, in which NASA plays an important role. A star forms as a clump of this gas and dust collapses, creating a warm glob of material fed by an encircling disk. These dusty envelopes glow brightest at longer wavelengths, appearing as red dots in this image. In several hundred thousand years, some of the forming stars will accrete enough material to trigger nuclear fusion at their cores and then blaze into stardom. The nebula is found below the three belt stars in the famous constellation of Orion the Hunter, which appears at night in northern latitudes during fall and then throughout winter. At a distance of around 1,500 light-years away from Earth, the nebula cannot quite be seen with the naked eye. Binoculars or a small telescope, however, are all it takes to get a good look in visible light at this stellar factory. Spitzer is designed to see shorter infrared wavelengths than Herschel. By combining their observations, astronomers get a more complete picture of star formation. The colors in this image relate to the different wavelengths of light, and to the temperature of material, mostly dust, in this region of Orion. Data from Spitzer show warmer objects in blue, with progressively cooler dust appearing green and red in the Herschel datasets. The more evolved, hotter embryonic stars thus appear in blue. The combined data traces the interplay of the bright, young stars with the cold and dusty surrounding clouds. A red garland of cool gas also notably runs through the Trapezium, the intensely bright region that is home to four humungous blue-white stars, and up into the rich star field. Infrared data at wavelengths of 8.0 and 24 microns from Spitzer are rendered in blue. Herschel data with wavelengths of 70 and 160 microns are represented in green and red, respectively. Herschel is a European Space Agency cornerstone mission, with science instruments provided by consortia of European institutes and with important participation by NASA. NASA's Herschel Project Office is based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for two of Herschel's three science instruments. The NASA Herschel Science Center, part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, supports the United States astronomical community. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. Image: NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/IRAM [high-resolution] Caption: JPL/NASA

Dec. 2: Sinuous Filament of Cosmic Dust This image from the APEX telescope, of part of the Taurus Molecular Cloud, shows a sinuous filament of cosmic dust more than ten light-years long. In it, newborn stars are hidden, and dense clouds of gas are on the verge of collapsing to form yet more stars. The cosmic dust grains are so cold that observations at submillimeter wavelengths, such as these made by the LABOCA camera on APEX, are needed to detect their faint glow. This image shows two regions in the cloud: the upper-right part of the filament shown here is Barnard 211, while the lower-left part is Barnard 213. The submillimeter-wavelength observations from the LABOCA camera on APEX, which reveal the heat glow of the cosmic dust grains, are shown here in orange tones. They are superimposed on a visible-light image of the region, which shows the rich background of stars. The bright star above the filament is φ Tauri. Image: ESO/APEX (MPIfR/ESO/OSO)/A. Hacar et al./Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin [high-resolution] Caption: ESO

Aug. 30: Saturn and Titan A giant of a moon appears before a giant of a planet undergoing seasonal changes in this natural color view of Titan and Saturn from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Titan, Saturn's largest moon, measures 3,200 miles, or 5,150 kilometers, across and is larger than the planet Mercury. Cassini scientists have been watching the moon's south pole since a vortex appeared in its atmosphere in 2012. See PIA14919 and PIA14920 to learn more about this mass of swirling gas around the pole in the atmosphere of the moon. As the seasons have changed in the Saturnian system, and spring has come to the north and autumn to the south, the azure blue in the northern Saturnian hemisphere that greeted Cassini upon its arrival in 2004 is now fading. The southern hemisphere, in its approach to winter, is taking on a bluish hue. This change is likely due to the reduced intensity of ultraviolet light and the haze it produces in the hemisphere approaching winter, and the increasing intensity of ultraviolet light and haze production in the hemisphere approaching summer. (The presence of the ring shadow in the winter hemisphere enhances this effect.) The reduction of haze and the consequent clearing of the atmosphere makes for a bluish hue: The increased opportunity for direct scattering of sunlight by the molecules in the air makes the sky blue, as on Earth. The presence of methane, which generally absorbs in the red part of the spectrum, in a now clearer atmosphere also enhances the blue. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ring plane. This mosaic combines six images -- two each of red, green and blue spectral filters -- to create this natural color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on May 6, 2012, at a distance of approximately 483,000 miles (778,000 kilometers) from Titan. Image scale is 29 miles (46 kilometers) per pixel on Titan. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI [high-resolution] Caption: Cassini Solstice Team

Oct.9: Thor's Helmet This VLT image of the Thor’s Helmet Nebula was taken on the occasion of ESO’s 50th Anniversary, Oct. 5, 2012, with the help of Brigitte Bailleul — winner of the Tweet Your Way to the VLT! competition. The observations were broadcast live over the internet from the Paranal Observatory in Chile. This object, also known as NGC 2359, lies in the constellation of Canis Major (The Great Dog). The helmet-shaped nebula is around 15,000 light-years away from Earth and is over 30 light-years across. The helmet is a cosmic bubble, blown as the wind from the bright, massive star near the bubble's center sweeps through the surrounding molecular cloud. Image: ESO/B. Bailleul [high-resolution] Caption: ESO