On January 13, 2021, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory imaged its first lunar transit of the year, when the moon crossed its view of the sun. The transit lasted about 30 minutes. The SDO spacecraft orbits Earth at a distance of 22,238 miles (35,789 kilometers), and has been observing the sun for more than a decade. #

A close-up image of the surface of the sun, taken with the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager High Resolution Telescope on the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter on May 28, 2020. The area shown is approximately 125,000 miles (201,170 kilometers) across and is centered on the middle of the sun. It shows the granulation pattern that results from the movement of hot plasma under the sun’s visible surface. #

A view of Venus, captured by the monitoring camera aboard the spacecraft BepiColombo during its first Venus flyby, on October 15, 2020. BepiColombo is a joint mission between the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, bound for orbit around Mercury. The roundabout trip from Earth to Mercury will take seven years and involves nine gravity assists, flying past Earth, Venus, and Mercury multiple times. #

When flying past Venus in July 2020, the WISPR instrument aboard NASA's Parker Solar Probe detected a bright rim around the edge of the planet that may be nightglow—light emitted by oxygen atoms high in the atmosphere that recombine into molecules on the nightside. The prominent dark feature in the center of the image is Aphrodite Terra, the largest highland region on the Venusian surface. Bright streaks in WISPR images, such as the ones seen here, are typically caused by a combination of charged particles—called cosmic rays—sunlight reflected by grains of space dust, and particles of material expelled from the spacecraft’s structures after impact with those dust grains. Scientists are still discussing the specific origins of the streaks seen here. #

The SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour is seen from a window on the docked SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience during its approach to the International Space Station on April 24, 2021. The SpaceX crew—Commander Shane Kimbrough, Pilot Megan McArthur, and Mission Specialists Akihiko Hoshide and Thomas Pesquet—would join the Expedition 65 crew shortly after docking the Harmony module's forward-facing international docking adapter. #

The Soyuz MS-18 crew ship approaches the ISS on April 9, 2021. The crew ship, with three Expedition 65 crew members aboard, approached the ISS 265 miles above Romania. The NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei, riding alongside the Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov, docked to the Rassvet module just three hours and 23 minutes after launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan. #

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the Crew Dragon capsule, is launched, carrying four astronauts on a NASA commercial crew mission to the ISS from Kennedy Space Center, in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on April 23, 2021. #

Looking up from Earth, the International Space Station appears as a tiny shadow as it transits the sun at roughly five miles per second on April 23, 2021, as seen from Nottingham, Maryland. #

A tiny patch of sunshine on a dark lunar surface. The rim of the Aepinus crater rises above a sea of darkness during a winter night on the moon, catching a tiny bit of sunlight, on March 10, 2020. The bright spot measures about one mile (1.6 kilometers) by 3.7 miles (6 kilometers). #

Several large boulders rest on the asteroid Bennu’s equatorial ridge, as seen by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on April 12, 2019, from a distance of 1.7 miles (2.8 kilometers). For scale, the largest boulder on the horizon is more than 17 feet (5.2 meters) tall, which is about the height of a two-story house. Bennu itself has a mean diameter of about .3 miles (490 meters). #

The shadow of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hayabusa2 spacecraft is seen after its successful touchdown on the asteroid Ryugu on February 22, 2019. The Hayabusa2 spacecraft left the asteroid Ryugu, about 180 million miles (300 million kilometers) from Earth, in late 2019, and dropped a capsule containing samples that landed in southern Australia on December 6, 2020. #

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover used two different cameras to create this selfie in front of Mont Mercou, a rock outcrop that stands 20 feet (six meters) tall. The panorama is made up of 60 images taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager on the rover’s robotic arm on March 26, 2021, the 3,070th Martian day, or "sol," of the mission. #

A field of sand dunes occupies a frosty, five-kilometer-diameter crater in the high latitudes of the northern plains of Mars, seen by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on March 15, 2021. Some dunes have separated from the main field and appear to be climbing up the crater slope along a gully-like form. #

From its landing site, Octavia E. Butler Landing, NASA's Perseverance rover can see a remnant of a fan-shaped deposit of sediment, known as a delta, with its Mastcam-Z instrument. Scientists believe that this delta is what remains of the confluence between an ancient river and a lake at Mars's Jezero crater. The delta remnant is the raised area of dark-brown rock in the middle of this image, acquired on February 22, 2021. #

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter, seen on Mars, as viewed by the Perseverance rover’s rear hazard camera on April 4, 2021, the 44th Martian day, or "sol," of the mission. After three successful test flights, Ingenuity is scheduled for a fourth flight today, April 29. #

This image of Jupiter, taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope on August 25, 2020, was captured when the planet was 406 million miles from Earth. Hubble’s sharp view is giving researchers an updated weather report on the monster planet’s turbulent atmosphere, including a remarkable new storm brewing and a cousin of the Great Red Spot changing color—again. The icy moon Europa is visible at left. #