Stunning images of space from the Natural History Museum's Otherworlds exhibition

This article originally appeared on Culture24.

Stunning images from our solar system as featured in a new Natural History Museum exhibition by artist, curator and writer Michael Benson who has painstakingly processed data from NASA and ESA missions to assemble some remarkable photographsStormy Jupiter

In this study of the solar system’s largest planet, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot appears as a churning dynamo, impeding the progress of the white clouds to its right and funnelling them into streaming tendrils below and to its left.

South is up in this view. Embedded in the south equatorial band, the Great Red Spot is actually a vast anticyclonic storm system three times the size of Earth that has been raging for at least 348 years.

Dark side of the rings

This spectacular view looks down on Saturn’s northern regions, with its pole still in the darkness of the northern hemisphere winter. The rings cast a band of shadow across the gas giant world.

Typhoon over Bay of Bengal

The immense vortex of tropical Cyclone 03B slams into India’s east coast with wind speeds approaching 120 kilometres an hour. Below, the teardrop-shaped island of Sri Lanka is relatively cloud free.

Moonlight on the Adriatic

In this luminous view of southern Europe, the Adriatic Sea with its many islands gleams in reflected moonlight. In the centre, the Italian peninsula extends into the Mediterranean Sea. To the lower right, Milan’s road network blazes. South is up.

Europa, an ice-covered ocean moon

Jumbled faults and curving ridges cover the face of Europa, one of the most enigmatic bodies in the solar system. Europa’s vast, ice-capped ocean is kept warm by the gravitational effects of Jupiter and its moons.

Antoniadi Crater near the lunar south pole

A distinctive far-side crater, 143-kilometre-wide Antoniadi has an uplifted central peak, visible to the left, and a well-preserved rim three kilometres high. Antoniadi lies within the Aitken Basin, the deepest basin on the Moon. As a result, the floor of the smaller crater, visible just below centre, has the lowest elevation on the Moon.

Crescent Jupiter and Ganymede

Jupiter’s largest moon Ganymede, seen here on the right, is the ninth largest object in the solar system and is bigger than the planet Mercury. Like Europa, Ganymede’s surface is composed of water ice, and is thought to have a sub-surface ocean.

A Plutonian Haze

When NASA’s New Horizon’s spacecraft flew by Pluto in July 2015, a sense of astonishment was experienced by the mission’s scientists. Pluto contained a far more variegated surface than anyone had dared to hope for. And soon after the closest approach, it became clear that when back-lit by the Sun, the dwarf planet’s tenuous atmosphere was as blue as the skies of Earth.

Enceladus vents water into space

Enceladus, Saturn’s sixth largest moon, erupts a vast spray of water into space from its southern polar region. The water immediately freezes. The moon is lit by the Sun on the left, and backlit by the reflecting surface of its parent planet to the right (not in this photograph).

A Warming Comet

The oddly twin-lobed Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko vents gas and dust about a month before perihelion – the closest point to the Sun along its orbit. Outflows and jets of cometary material can be seen as the comet heats up.

• Otherworlds: Visions of our Solar System by Michael Benson opens at the Natural History Museum on January 22 and runs until May 15 2016.

Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk/science-and-nature/art544190-stunning-images-of-space-from-the-natural-history-museums-otherworlds-exhibition