For now, the thousands of potential exoplanets discovered in the past two years are little more than curvy dips on a graph. Astronomers using the Kepler Space Telescope pick them out by examining the way they blot out their own stars' light as they move through their orbits. But if astronomers could block out the stars themselves, they may be able to see the planets directly. A new adaptive optics system on the storied Palomar Observatory just started doing that - it's the first of its kind capable of spotting planets outside our solar system.

Watching the transit of Venus through telescopes at the local planetarium was impressive, but it was nothing compared to this view from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, the most advanced spacecraft ever built to stare at the sun. SDO captured a high-res view of the event through a series of filters.

Of all the ways planets can die - consumed by their host stars, for instance, or obliterated by a collision with another planet or asteroid - evaporation isn't one that had crossed many astronomer's minds. But data from the exoplanet-hunting Kepler observatory has revealed a nearby planet - just 1,500 light years from Earth - that appears to be evaporating before our very eyes. Over the next 100 million years, the planet will completely disintegrate.

Despite funding cuts and a devastating fire in 2003, Australia's Mount Stromlo continues to punch above its weight when it comes to international astronomy.

Some 12 million light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Centaurus, the most prominent source of galactic radio emissions in the sky rests in the galaxy Centaurus A. Here, a truly gigantic black hole 100 million times more massive than our sun is (most likely) ejecting huge amounts of energy as it helps rip another galaxy apart, and the European Southern Observatory has snapped a brand new image of the elliptical galaxy in stunning new resolution.

Given you can, by definition, see the Sun almost every single day, it takes a lot to truly impress us when it comes to solar photography. Well, this image by NASA depicting a solar flare (or alternatively some sort of galactic superhero) has done just that. Who said teal couldn't make things awesome?