BEST SPACE & ASTRONOMY PHOTOS OF 2008

Each year, photographs pour in from across the universe that astonish, amaze and inspire us all.

The year 2008? No exception, of course.

From glowing auroras on Saturn to crashing avalanches on Mars, here we show you the best of the year's space images.

Saturn's Aurora

Saturn possesses plenty of strange features, but this year's discovery of an aurora hovering over the gas giant's southern pole may top them all.

The sharp-shooting Cassini spacecraft captured this infrared image of the action, backdropped by Saturn's equally strange hexagon of gas.

Pole-covering auroras such as this are less common than ringed versions at Earth and Jupiter. All, however, are generated the same way: Magnetic fields pull in particles from the sun and ionize planetary gas into a glow.

Credit: JPL/ESA/NASA - For a full-resolution image, click here.