Could we be in for a bumper crop of Geminid meteors just before the middle of December? There’s a good chance that we will given that their parent body, the mysterious crumbly “rock comet” 3200 Phaethon, is also making a close flyby of Earth this month.

Peering deep into the heart of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, the Hubble Space Telescope reveals a rich tapestry of more than half a million stars. Most of the stars pictured in the image are members of the Milky Way nuclear star cluster, the densest and most massive star cluster in the galaxy. Hidden in the centre is the Milky Way’s resident supermassive black hole.

Mission controllers are trying to diagnose a problem that put NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting observatory in emergency mode nearly 75 million miles from Earth this week.