Here are the best space images of 2023

The year's most interesting space images include infrared views of the "bones" of the galaxy, an asteroid's double moon, Jupiter's giant polar vortex, and more.

2023, like all the years before it – and every year to come, no doubt – has seen peaks of good news and troughs of bad news.  But a constant and reliable source of awe and beauty is the sky above our heads.  After journeys of just seconds to billions of years, light from astronomical objects in the universe rains down on us all, and scientists have patiently photographed some of it to better understand the universe we live in.

And every year we see new things, or old things in new ways, and I've been given the wonderful task of choosing my favorites and conveying to you what they mean.  Year-end lists, especially those featuring astronomical imagery, tend to be dazzling and colorful.  This is understandable, but what they sometimes miss are more nuanced images, ones that hide important discoveries in simple visual details or offer new perspectives on familiar things.  They may not jump off the page, but they still have an impact.

Heavenly burial for this year.  This gallery is by no means complete, but it showcases what I think are some of the most interesting astronomical images to emerge in 2023.

The apocalyptic glow of the bones of the galaxy

No exhibition like this would be complete without something from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), our newest infrared eye in the sky.  This giant observatory has created so many small revolutions in astronomy, which makes choosing one from last year no easy task.  Should it be a young star having a massive tantrum or a massive old star shedding material at enormous rates before inevitably exploding as a supernova?  Or should it be a map of an amazing 100,000 galaxies?