On September 24, a late evening commercial flight from Singapore to Australia offered stratospheric views of the southern hemisphere's night sky.

What could shoot out a neutron star like a cannon ball?

M13 is modestly recognized as the Great Globular Star Cluster in Hercules.

Meteors can be colorful. While the human eye usually cannot discern many colors, cameras often can.

Today Comet Wirtanen passes by the Earth. The kilometer-sized dirty snowball orbits the Sun every 5.4 years, ranging as far out as Jupiter and as close in as the Earth.

Some night skies are serene and passive -- others shimmer and flash. The later, in the form of auroras and meteors, haunted skies over the island of Kvaløya, near Tromsø Norway on 2009 December 13.

There's even a California in space. Drifting through the Orion Arm of the spiral Milky Way Galaxy, this cosmic cloud by chance echoes the outline of California on the west coast of the United States.

Jewels don't shine this bright -- only stars do. And almost every spot in this glittering jewel-box of an image from the Hubble Space Telescope is a star.

There's a "camera" comet now moving across the sky.