There’s a permanence to space that far exceeds the fleeting lives of the people who come to explore it. This never seems truer than when we remember the people who have perished in the effort. Feb. 1 is NASA’s official day of remembrance—a date chosen partly because it recalls the Feb. 1, 2003 loss of the shuttle Columbia and the seven astronauts aboard it. The gallery of space images that follows has nothing to do with the astronauts and cosmonauts who have been lost in the past 60 years—and yet everything to do with them too.
Window on Infinity: The Month in Space and a Day of Remembrance
An album of images from near and distant space
NASA / ESA / HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE
This image gazes nearly 200,000 light-years from Earth, at the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. As our galaxy's gravity gently tugs on its neighbor, its gas clouds collapse to form new stars.
