21 Amazing Science Images Of 2014

1. Earth and the Moon, in a Single Frame. China's Chang'e 5 test vehicle captured this rare glimpse of the Moon's far side in October, from just past the halfway point on its lunar-looping test flight.

2. The First-Ever Footage of a "Black Seadevil". On November 17th, researchers with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute acquired footage of Melanocetus aka "the Black Seadevil", a species of anglerfish never before filmed alive in its natural, deep-sea habitat.

3. Stare Into the Heart of the Biggest Sunspot in 24 Years. On October 25th, giant sunspot AR 2192 the largest sunspot astronomers have observed in nearly a quarter century erupted in an X3.1-class solar flare, one of the most powerful flares documented this year.

4. Google Executive Alan Eustace Crushes Felix Baumgartner's Free-Fall Record.Alan Eustace, a senior vice president at Google, fell from the top of the stratosphere on the morning of October 24, plummeting nearly 26 vertical miles in the span of about 15 minutes. In doing so, he broke daredevil Felix Baumgartner's 2012 record for world's highest-altitude free fall by more than 1,000 feet.

5. The Great Lakes Experience Their Deepest Freeze in 20 Years. In February, for the first time since 1994, 88 of the surface of the Great Lakes froze solid.

6. Marvel at the Awesome Sight of a Volcanic Blast. Earlier this year, while vacationing in Papua New Guinea with his wife, Phil McNamara captured this captivating footage of Mount Tavurvur ejecting untold heaps of lava, rock, and ash hundreds of meters into the air. Between the striking burst of clouds above the volcano and the jarring boom of the delayed shockwave, it's one of the most dramatic eruption videos we've ever seen.

7. Photo of Super Typhoon Vongfong. NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman captured this incredible photograph of super typhoon Vongfang on October 9th, from aboard the International Space Station. "I've seen many from here," Wiseman said of Vongfong, which had recently become the largest, most powerful storm of 2014, "but none like this."

8. Mesmerizing Anatomical X-Ray GIFs. San Francisco based graphic designer Cameron Drake converted some X-ray footage into a series of GIFs for one of his recent projects. The resulting animations are really quite beautiful.

9. The Deepest into Space Anyone Has Ever Seen. Using a naturally-existing zoom lens in space, the Hubble telescope in January took the deepest look into a cluster of galaxies ever taken in space to grab these pictures of galaxy cluster Abell 2744.

10. New Images Reveal the Shape of our Galaxy's Magnetic Field. The colors show temperature, with dark red the hottest and dark blue the coldest. And the relief lines reveal the shape of the vast magnetic field that envelops our galaxy and protects us from some of the high energy particles zooming through deep space.

11. Historic Image of Planet Formation Around a Young Star. Earlier this year, the Atacama Large Millimetersubmillimeter Array ALMA captured the sharpest picture ever of a protoplanetary disc surrounding a young star. The image, which bears a striking resemblance to prior artistic impressions, is set to revolutionize our understanding of how planets form. The picture is one of ALMA's first observations to be made at its near-final configuration, as this remarkable device is still being calibrated. The new image was taken as part of the testing and verification process for the telescope so the best images are still to come.

12. Real Life Mosquito Tornado is far More Terrifying Than Sharknado. While visiting Leziria Grande at Vila Franca de Xira in Portugal recently, photographer Ana Filipa Scarpa noticed something off in the distance that resembled a funnel cloud. But it wasn't a tornado, or even a funnel for that matter. Rather, it was something... alive.

13. A Stunning Example of Collective Intelligence. Individual ants are not very smart, but ants working together in a colony are capable of extraordinary feats. Case in point: This remarkable video, in which a colony of ants has transformed into a daisy chain to pull a dead millipede behavior which, prior to the video's release, had never been seen before.

14. A Close-Up View of One of the World's Most Venomous Spiders

15. This ISS Experiment Looks Like a Miniature Star Factory. Flame Extinguishment-2 FLEX-2 is the second iteration of an experiment designed to test how burning droplets of fuel behave in space. But unlike other fire experiments aboard the ISS, FLEX-2 requires the flaming droplets to be suspended, free of other objects like, say, a candle wick to better study the rate at which fuel mixtures evaporate and burn, and the conditions required for soot to form.

16. Giant, Worm-Slurping Leech Filmed for the First Time. For the first time, filmmakers in the forests of Borneo's Mount Kinabalu documented the so-repulsive-it's-captivating behavior of a large, red, worm-guzzling predator. While it remains unclassified by science, the animal is known to the area's tribespeople, fittingly, as the "Giant Red Leech."

17. This is a Praying Mantis Wearing 3D Glasses. Scientists at Newcastle University are outfitting praying mantises with the world's smallest 3D glasses, to better understand how these notoriously dextrous predators perceive depth.

18. The Curiosity Rover Snaps a Stunning Photo of a Martian Sunset. In April, the Curiosity rover snapped this shot of the sun setting behind Gale Crater's western rim. And as you can see, the sunsets on Mars are quite different from what we see here on Earth.

19. NASA Observes a Solar Explosion in Unprecedented Detail. In May, NASA's sun-observing IRIS spacecraft got its first close-up look at a colossal coronal mass ejection erupting from the sun, and boy howdy was it beautiful.

20. Chemical Reactions Shot in Ultra HD. A stunning collaboration between Tsinghua University Press and University of Science and Technology of China now showcases eight different types of these reactions in exquisite detail.

21. The Rosetta Mission Lands on a Comet. On August 6, after traveling through space for more than a decade, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft rendezvoused with comet 67PChuryumov-Gerasimenko. On November 12th, Rosetta's Philae lander successfully landed on the comet the first such landing in human history. For these momentous achievements, the Rosetta mission gets two images: A photo taken by Philae from the surface of 67PC-G, and a selfie of Rosetta in orbit around the comet.