SPACE PHOTOS OF THE WEEK: YOU JUST TRY TO SNAP A PIC AT 100,000 MPH

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GET READY, BECAUSE this week’s space photos are nothing short of epic. First we’re starting out close to home, just 43 light minutes away at Jupiter. NASA’s Juno spacecraft recently completed its tenth orbit around this behemoth of a planet. Juno is in a polar orbit, meaning it flies over the north pole, quickly around the curve of the planet, and back out below the south pole—all at an astounding speed of around 100,000 miles per hour. Each pass the spacecraft makes allows for more scientific research, and Juno manages to take some pretty mind-bending images at the same time.

The gorgeous imagery continues if you speed outward to a star cluster called NGC 3201. We’re going to stay there for a while, because, well, it’s just that amazing. Star clusters like NGC 3201 are prime targets of study for astronomers, because they are some of the oldest known stellar objects in the universe. Objects with this kind of seniority can teach astronomers a lot about what the early universe looked like, as well as how strange objects like these clusters form. And a senior it is; NGC 3201 is over 10 billion years old, located 16,000 light years from Earth. The light from this week’s series of images spent 16,000 years traveling across the universe to the telescopes at the European Southern Observatory and NASA’s Hubble Space telescope.

Not ready for this week’s space journey to end? There are more cosmic galleries here.