The 18th Conference of the Parties (COP18) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 8th Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP8) were held in Doha, Qatar from 26 November to 7 December. This image from the SPOT-6 satellite was acquired on 27 September 2012.

NGC 922, a galaxy that has been hit square-on by another. Ripples of star-formation are still propagating out across thousands of light-years of space over 300 million years after the collision, making it a prime example of what astronomers call a collisional ring galaxy.

Northern China is pictured in this image acquired by Envisat’s MERIS instrument on 8 February 2012. The North China Plain dominates the image, bordered on the north and west by mountains, with the Yellow Sea to the east. Flowing northeast across the Plain we can see the Yellow River – China’s second longest – before it empties into the Bohai Sea, the innermost gulf of the Yellow Sea. In the upper left portion of the image near the mountains, China’s capital Beijing looks like a shaded circle.

NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg (left), cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano (right) at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre, November 2012.

Luca, Karen and Fyodor are the Soyuz TMA-07M back-up crew, the prime crew will be launched to the International Space Station in December 2012.

Luca is assigned engineer on a long duration mission to the International Space Station planned for 2013.

Looking back on the Universe’s history for a specific patch of the sky observed by Herschel and Keck to reveal many previously unseen starburst galaxies. This graphic shows a representation of the distribution of nearly 300 galaxies in one 1.4 x 1.4 degree field of view. In total, Keck identified 767 galaxies found by Herschel.

Five starburst galaxies (as seen by the ESA/NASA Hubble Space Telescope) are shown as insets. The light from the nearest galaxy shown in the insets has been travelling towards us for 2.6 billion years, while for the furthest inset galaxy it has been travelling for 10.2 billion years.

The galaxies were first detected by ESA’s Herschel space observatory and an example of one of the far-infrared fields of view is shown in the graphic. The redshifts were determined by the ground-based W.M. Keck telescopes.

The brilliant cascade of stars through the middle of this image is the galaxy ESO 318-13 as seen by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Despite being millions of light-years from Earth, the stars captured in this image are so bright and clear you could almost attempt to count them. Although ESO 318-13 is the main event in this image, it is sandwiched between a vast collection of bright celestial objects. Several stars near and far dazzle in comparison to the neat dusting contained within the galaxy.

High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) nadir and colour channel data taken during revolution 10778 on 18 June 2012 by ESA’s Mars Express have been combined to form a natural-colour view of Charitum Montes. Centred at around 53°S and 334°E, the image has a ground resolution of about 20 m per pixel. The heavily cratered region in this image is at the edge of the almost 1000 km long mountain range, which itself wraps around the boundary of the Argyre impact basin, the second largest on Mars.