A glowing comet. A star-forming cloud. A new view of the Andromeda galaxy. A dense galaxy cluster. NASA Wednesday released the first images from its sky-mapping spacecraft, which captured a hodgepodge of cosmic targets two months after its launch on a mission to map the entire sky. Since launching in December, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE for short, has sent back more than 250,000 raw images. Orbiting some 325 miles above the Earth, WISE scans the sky in search of hard-to-see asteroids, comets, stars, galaxies and other celestial objects. One of its main tasks is to spot objects that may pose a danger to Earth.
