Photos of the Solar System

Join All About Space’s tour of some of the very best images of our neighbouring bodies

Written by Stuart Atkinson

1 SOLAR PROMINENCE

Date taken: 2012

Taken by: The Solar Dynamics Observatory

If you take a brief glimpse of the Sun through thin clouds, all you’ll see is a white disc, perhaps with a few small, dark sunspots spattered across it. But the filtered cameras of solar observatories orbiting Earth show the Sun is a very active, very dynamic object. This image taken by the SDO shows a prominence, a huge loop of plasma, erupting up off the Sun’s surface and billowing out millions of miles into space.

2 URANUS WITH BACKGROUND GALAXIES

Date taken: 2023

Taken by: The James Webb Space Telescope

Although it has been photographed by Hubble for almost 40 years, the most impressive images we have of Uranus are still those taken by the Voyager 2 probe as it raced past the planet in January 1986, just two days before the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded after liftoff. But in 2023 the James Webb Space Telescope took this stunning new view of this distant ice giant in a sky dotted with stars and strewn with faraway galaxies.

3 NEPTUNE

Date taken: 2023

Taken by: Webb

Neptune is the most distant planet in the Solar System, and when Webb turned its cameras on it the images it took were genuinely stunning. They not only showed the ice giant’s icy rings, atmospheric bands and clouds in amazing detail, but the many background galaxies surrounding the planet too. And that’s not a bright foreground star blazing close to Neptune – that’s its largest moon Triton.