Look, we all know that space is the final frontier, that space is cold and unforgiving and that in it, nobody can hear you scream. But what you might not know is that, when it thinks nobody is looking, space puts on a frilly dress, covers its forearms in honey and spins around until it falls over ... because space is just flat-out crazy as hell. Oh, don't take our word for it or anything; we have photographic evidence.
Jupiter in Motion
You know what Jupiter looks like -- kind of like a dirty marble -- and you know, objectively, that those bands and swirls you're looking at are all big storms. But it's one thing to know something like that, and another to see it in action. Here's a gif of what Jupiter's storms actually look like in motion.

GIF Bin

IT'S GETTING CLOSER!
You might have seen this before in the movie Another Earth, but if not, well, now you have this time-lapse gif to haunt your existential nightmares for the rest of time. The way those bands all churn at separate speeds and writhe around on the surface in every direction at once -- Jupiter looks less like a serene gas giant and more like a behemoth, roiling mass of space tentacles. And if our totally reasonable and scientific predictions pan out, and Jupiter does indeed turn out to be the egg of Space Cthulhu, we know exactly where it was laid ...
The Bottomless Pit on the Sun
What looks like a terrifying cavern in the middle of a Minecraft lava lake is actually a closeup of a sunspot taken from the New Jersey Institute of Technology's Big Bear Solar Observatory. We would've guessed all sorts of things from this image -- a retinal image from Sauron's annual eye exam, an extreme closeup of some kind of skin infection, a freshly violated orange -- but never the sun. Since when is the friggin' sun black? Well, probably since around the same time that ...
Mars Grew a Bunch of Faces
Well, they ain't got jack in comparison to the masterworks of Mars' more gifted Renaissance sculptor: Libya Montes, most famous for her "crowned face" of Mars.
Why have we never seen this before? That visage is way more compelling than the crude scrawl of the happy face or the expressionless mask of Martian Andre the Giant up there. You can actually make out details on this one: Those full lips, big, round eyes, perky little nose -- hell, we don't just see a face there; we can actually make out enough detail to definitively state whether or not we'd bone the model who sat for it.
Mars Is a Dali Fan
What is that? Kelp beneath the ocean? Black food coloring dropped in a glass of rose? A bitchin' new screensaver for the iPad? Nope, that's Mars. Those are "intersecting swirling trails" left by dust devils racing across the sand dunes. The dark streaks, however, are another matter ...
That looks like a surrealist's impression of a dozen mascara-laced eyes dribbling tears down their giant eyelashes. Or maybe it's an aerial shot of oases in an oversaturated desert. Or no, maybe it's just Mars being weird again: What you are looking at are actually "dark streaks of collapsed material running down sand dunes due to carbon dioxide frost evaporation."
Or hey, maybe for once your eyes aren't lying to you, and it's just the billion-eyed Lady of the Red Planet having a good eon-long cry. But why would she be crying? Well, maybe it's because Mars just misses you so damn much ...
Hearts of Mars
Don't buy into any of that "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" crap. Mars has remembered Valentine's Day every year for the last several millennia, while Venus not only leaves the toilet seat up, it also rains fiery acid every damn day.
OK, OK, clearly we're overreacting to some very basic shapes formed by meteor strikes and such. But you know what we're not overreacting to? The goddamn Bigfoot sightings.
Martian Bigfoot


It shouldn't be too surprising that Saturn, the most fashionable hussy in the solar system, likes to turn the cosmic ballet into a glow stick rave when no one is looking. We mean, just look at the way it dresses.
Earth's Auroras from Space
What the hell is that? Did we actually capture evidence of the human soul ... in orbit? Is this a screencap from Back to the Future 4: Escape Velocity? Or did somebody just shut down the containment system, because this shit looks like it's straight out of Ghostbusters.
That's just what the aurora borealis looks like from space. Turns out the earthbound view that we see so many awe-inspiring pictures of is actually like looking at the sunset through a fish tank. It's only once you get above all that pesky air and atmosphere that you really clear that view up, and you get to see the real light show.

Earth's Abstract Artwork

Saturn isn't the only one whose planetary grill Earth is gettin' all up into: Not to be shown up by Mars, we've got our own modern art gallery going on down here, too. What you're looking at above is actually part of the Sahara Desert, the Tanezrouft Basin, as viewed from space. It's known in Southern Algeria as the "Land of Terror," ostensibly because it's so desolate.

But man, just look at it: We suspect that whoever named it kind of knew that someday we'd get far enough up to realize that it looks like somebody melted a bunch of crayons on the Predator's face.
"That's No Moon ..."

If you have a really bad feeling about this, don't worry. That thing ain't operational.

You're looking at Saturn's moon Mimas, whose enormous crater Herschel makes it a dead ringer for a defunct, rusted over Death Star. Now, we know what you're thinking: This is where George Lucas got the inspiration, right?
The Most Action-Packed Nebula
That's the Calabash Nebula, also known as "The Rotten Egg Nebula," so named because it would smell like one (if you managed to get a whiff before dying in the horrible vacuum of space, that is). It's just chock-full of sulfur. However, that's another example of jaded astronomers focusing on the novelty of the wrong thing. See, we'd call it the Bullet Smashing Apple Nebula, on account of how it looks surprisingly like this:
God Is Watching