This photo of Venus and Jupiter, together, was taken from the International Space Station by station commander Scott Kelly during the 2015 conjunction. In space, unlike on Earth, you don't have to contend with the atmosphere or the horizon, making such sights much more easily visible. The semi-transparent limb of the Earth is our planet's atmosphere and airglow, while many stars within our Milky Way are visible as fainter objects in this same field-of-view.
Credit: Scott Kelly/NASA
Key Takeaways
- No matter whether we’re looking nearby or extremely far away, once our penetrating gaze leaves the sights of this world behind, what we see fills us with a sense of awe, wonder, and curiosity.
- Yet depending on whether we look at things that are right in our cosmic backyard or extremely far away, we won’t just see different levels of detail, but also fundamentally different classes of objects.
- From the Solar System to the stars of the Milky Way to galaxies near-and-far, quasars, black holes, and even the earliest light in the cosmos, here’s a glimpse of all that we can see: both near and far.
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Looking skyward fills us with wonder.
The solar corona, as shown here, is imaged out to 25 solar radii during the 2006 total solar eclipse. The longer the duration of a total solar eclipse, the darker the sky becomes, and the better the corona and background astronomical objects can be seen. Experienced, serious eclipse photographers can construct images such as these from their eclipse data, showcasing the extent of the solar corona as well as a plethora of more distant background astronomical objects.
Credit: Martin Antoš, Hana Druckmüllerová, Miloslav Druckmüller
Off-world, the Sun, planets, stars, and galaxies all await.
Now that Saturn has been imaged by JWST, the first “family portrait” of the gas giant worlds as seen by JWST’s eyes can be composed. Here, each planet is shown with an angular size that’s calibrated to how they would appear relative to one another as seen by JWST. Planets can be as large as about twice Jupiter’s size, but may be as small as 1000 km or even less.
Credit: NASA. CSA. ESA. STScI and various collaborations; Composite: E. Siegel
Our Solar System encompasses our own cosmic backyard.
A logarithmic chart of distances, showing the planets, the Voyager spacecraft, the Oort Cloud, and our nearest star: Proxima Centauri. If we imagine building larger and larger particle accelerators, every factor of 10 in radius gets us another factor of 10 in energy, but typically at the expense of another factor of 100 in cost. On planetary and stellar scales, this can get prohibitively large very quickly.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Farther away, stars and star clusters abound within the Milky Way.
This region of space shows a portion of the plane of the Milky Way, with three extended star-forming regions all side-by-side next to one another. The Omega Nebula (left), the Eagle Nebula (center), and Sharpless 2-54 (right), compose just a small fraction of a vast complex of gas and dust found all through the galactic plane that continuously lead to the formation of newborn stars.
Credit: European Southern Observatory
Hundreds of billions of stars exist just within our home galaxy.
The Milky Way, as seen at La Silla observatory, is a stunning, awe-inspiring sight to anyone, and offers a spectacular view of a great many stars in our galaxy. There are approximately 6000 stars visible to the naked human eye, but the ones we can see are intrinsically brighter, bluer, and/or closer than the more typical, numerous stars of the Milky Way. We can only see the ones that are the easiest for our eyes to detect, and still don’t know how many total stars are present within the Milky Way: due to large uncertainties at the low-mass end of the stellar spectrum.
Credit: ESO / Håkon Dahle
Inside our Local Group, only Andromeda surpasses us in mass, size, and stars.
Our Local Group of galaxies is dominated by Andromeda and the Milky Way, but there’s no denying that Andromeda is the biggest, the Milky Way is #2, Triangulum is #3, and the LMC is #4. At just 165,000 light-years away, the LMC is by far the closest among the top 10+ galaxies to our own, and as such it takes up the largest angular span in the sky of all galaxies outside the Milky Way. There are over 100 galaxies within the Local Group, but Andromeda and the Milky Way contain most of the stars, as well as most of the mass.
Credit: Andrew Z. Colvin/Wikimedia Commons
More than 5 million light-years away, galaxies abound in groups and clusters.
This triplet of galaxies highlights the three most prominent members of the Leo Group of galaxies, located 35 million light-years away from the Milky Way. Consisting of M65, M66, and NGC 3628, these galaxies are gravitationally unbound from both the Milky Way and the more distant Virgo Cluster, but are, much like our Local Group, a bound structure on their own.
Credit: Giuseppe Donatiello/Nicola Di Lorenzo/Wikimedia Commons
The closest galaxy cluster is found ~55 million light-years away: the Virgo Cluster.
Markarian’s chain, shown here, represents an alignment of large, massive galaxies found within the Virgo cluster. There are approximately 1,000 large galaxies in the Virgo cluster, a large fraction of which were discovered way back in the 18th century. The Virgo cluster is located some 50–60 million light-years away from our Milky Way and is the largest concentration of galaxies in the extremely nearby Universe, containing many giant ellipticals.
Credit: Nielander/Wikimedia Commons
Within it, we find the largest nearby supermassive black hole: Messier 87*.
The first image of a photon ring around a black hole, clearly indicating the presence of an event horizon on account of the dark center, was constructed from 2017 data (at left) by the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration. Using data from 1 year later (at right), they demonstrated that these features persist, completely independently of the first image. The data, taken a full year apart, confirms the nature of a supermassive black hole’s event horizon.
Credit: Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration
Even more massive galaxy clusters exist farther away, like the Coma Cluster.
The Coma Cluster of galaxies, as seen with a composite of modern space and ground-based telescopes. The infrared data comes from the Spitzer Space Telescope, while ground-based data comes from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The Coma Cluster is dominated by two giant elliptical galaxies, with over 1000 other spirals and ellipticals inside. Gas-free, red-and-dead elliptical galaxies are very common, especially toward the cluster center, in large galaxy clusters such as this one. The speed of galaxies within the cluster can be used to help determine the cluster’s total mass, revealing our first evidence for dark matter in the 1930s.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / L. Jenkins (GSFC)
The largest known single galaxy is IC 1101: at cluster Abell 2029‘s center.
This view of galaxy IC 1101 inside the galaxy cluster Abell 2029 is deceptive: this isn’t a single, normal galaxy orbited by a slew of dwarf galaxies and globular clusters, but rather the largest giant elliptical galaxy known, alongside many other galaxies larger than even the Milky Way.
Credit: Pan-STARRS
Between the galaxy clusters are giant voids, containing only rare, isolated galaxies.
The isolated galaxy MCG+01-02-015, all by its lonesome for over 100,000,000 light years in all directions, is presently thought to be the loneliest galaxy in the Universe. The features seen in this galaxy are consistent with it being a massive spiral that formed from a long series of minor mergers, but that has never experienced a major merger, and where star-forming activity has been relatively quiet for the past several billion years. A galaxy such as this may continue forming new stars in an ongoing fashion for much longer than the present age of the Universe.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA and N. Grogin (STScI); Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt
Usually within galaxy clusters, supermassive black holes can become active.
Quasar 3C 273, shown as it appears in the optical (left) and with a coronagraph applied to the bright central source (right), is a galaxy located 1.99 billion light-years away. It is the brightest quasar in Earth’s night sky, and was the first quasar ever to be identified.
Credits: NASA, A. Martel (JHU), H. Ford (JHU), M. Clampin (STScI), G. Hartig (STScI), G. Illingworth (UCO/Lick Observatory), the ACS Science Team and ESA
The largest quasar jet, Porphyrion, is 23 million light-years long.
This animation showcases Porphyrion, its extent, and many of the features observed in radio wavelengths with LOFAR and GMRT. This is the largest black hole jet system, at present, ever discovered.
Credit: Susanne Landis & Konrad Rappaport (Science Communication Lab)
On still-larger scales, the structure of the cosmic web appears.
This slice of the DESI data maps celestial objects from Earth (center) to billions of light years away. Among the objects are nearby bright galaxies (yellow), luminous red galaxies (orange), emission-line galaxies (blue), and quasars (green). The large-scale structure of the universe is visible in the inset image, which shows the densest survey region and represents less than 0.1% of the DESI survey’s total volume. The large “walls” seen in the inset mostly consist of multiple galaxy clusters that are mutually unbound, and will tear apart as dark energy dominates the cosmic expansion.Credit: Claire Lamman/DESI collaboration
These superclusters and filaments aren’t gravitationally bound, they’ll be torn apart by dark energy.
The size of our visible Universe (yellow), along with the amount we can reach (magenta) if we left, today, on a journey at the speed of light. The limit of the visible Universe is 46.1 billion light-years, as that’s the limit of how far away an object that emitted light that would just be reaching us today would be after expanding away from us for 13.8 billion years. Anything that occurs, right now, within a radius of 18 billion light-years of us, will eventually reach and affect us; anything beyond that point will not. Each year, another ~20 million stars cross the threshold from being reachable to being unreachable.
Credit: Andrew Z. Colvin and Frederic Michel, Wikimedia Commons; Annotations: E. Siegel
The most distant object, MoM-z14, is 33.8 billion light-years away.
This image shows a three-filter NIRCam view of galaxy MoM-z14: the new record holder (as of May 16, 2025) for the most distant galaxy ever discovered. Invisible at wavelengths below 1.8 microns, JWST has measured its spectrum and detected several emission lines, cementing its status as arising from when the Universe was a mere 282 million years old.
Credit: R.P. Naidu et al., Open Journal of Astrophysics (submitted)/arXiv:2505.11263, 2025
Only the Big Bang’s leftover glow, 46 billion light-years away, appears more distant.
This composite image shows the microwave sky as imaged by three generations of spaceborne CMB missions: COBE (1990s), WMAP (2000s), and Planck (2010s). With time, we’ve become more sensitive to smaller-magnitude temperature and polarization features at progressively smaller angular scales.
Credit: Smoot Cosmology Group/LBL/ESA
Mostly Mute Monday tells an astronomical story in images, visuals, and no more than 200 words.
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