This week's extraordinary nasa photos include an amazingly psychedelic look at space.
The image above, is a composite shot of 18 images captured by a camera mounted on the international space station.
Don Pettit, ISS expedition 31 Flight Engineer, told Nasa how he created the image: "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."
Earth from space looks colourful and peaceful. Also shot from the ISS, these images of the Earth's coastline were taken when the ISS was in low orbit of the planet.
The images were taken with the space station HICO and RAIDS Experiment Payload-Hyperspectral Imager for the Coastal Ocean, or HREP-HICO.
Earth as a tiny bead in a sea of asteroids is another astounding image released by Nasa this week. We get a side-on view of near-earth asteroids created by Nasa's NEOWISE survey. The survey found that more potentially hazardous asteroids within our solar system than previous models suggested.