Gallery: Space Photos of the Week: A Wonky Spiral Galaxy Has an Identity Crisis
<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/sahara-desert-from-the-space-stations-earthkam">ESA/NASA</a>01SPoW-Dec9-09.jpg
NGC 4388 is one of 1300 galaxies that make up the Virgo constellation, but it’s a little confused. It has the classic, smooth shape of an elliptical galaxy but has symmetrical spiral arms emerging from the core like a spiral galaxy. While it's technically a spiral galaxy, the strange shape was most likely caused by bumping into other nearby galaxies.
<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/sahara-desert-from-the-space-stations-earthkam">Sally Ride EarthKAM</a>02SPoW-Dec9-08.jpg
Middle school students programmed an International Space Station camera to take this photo of the Sahara desert.
<a href="https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/resources/7564/?category=images">NASA</a>03SPoW-Dec9-04.jpg
Different filters show varying altitudes of cloud coverage in Saturn’s northern hemisphere.
<a href="http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA21217">NASA</a>04SPoW-Dec9-06.jpg
This image of Valles Marineris, a system of canyons on Mars, shows the colorful bedrock beneath.
<a href="http://m.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2016/12/Cool_sunrise">Thomas Pesquet</a>05SPoW-Dec9-01.jpg
Astronaut Thomas Pesquet took this photo of flying towards the sunrise from the International Space Station.
<a href="https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/resources/7565/?category=images">NASA</a>06SPoW-Dec9-03.jpg
In this view of the jet stream around Saturn’s north pole, each side of the hexagon is about as wide as Earth.
<a href="http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1642a/">ESO</a>07SPoW-Dec9-02.jpg
In this map, invisible dark matter is shown in pink, covering an area 420 times the size of the full moon.
