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For 10 years, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has been helping scientists on Earth learn more about the mysterious objects hiding in our star-studded skies. On Aug. 25 2003, the telescope -- carrying a relatively small, 0.85-meter beryllium mirror -- launched from Cape Canaveral, FL. Since then, it's been trailing the Earth on its orbit around the sun, like NASA's Kepler spacecraft.

Spitzer stares at the heavens in infrared wavelengths, revealing the cold, distant, and dusty realms of the universe, normally invisible to eyes on Earth. In this gallery, ribbons of dust wind around massive stars, the cavities carved by hot, young stars open up like bottomless caverns, and the spiraling tendrils of a distant galaxy glisten behind a foreground nebula.

Spitzer's first years in operation were spent studying the sky in the longest infrared wavelengths, a task that required cooling the instruments to within a few degrees of absolute zero. When the liquid helium coolant ran out -- long after the mission's minimal 2.5-year duration -- the telescope switched to a "warm" phase, where it studies objects nearer the Earth at shorter wavelength.

During its time in space, Spitzer has seen, for the first time, an exoplanet's glimmering light, discovered the largest ring around Saturn, and stared at the center of the Milky Way.

Instead of celebrating with a traditional 10-year anniversary gift of tin or aluminum (because let's face it, that's lame), we thought we'd share some of the extraordinary images produced by this telescope. We thought we'd pick one for each year, but it was impossibly hard to choose from among the many transfixing spacescapes crossing our screens. So, after much agonizing, we finally picked these 16 beauties.

Above:

What looks like an even more terrifying version of the Eye of Sauron is actually the Helix Nebula, about 700 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius. Here, the white dwarf star (visible in the very center), is the dead remnant of what was once a star like the sun. The bright red glow immediately around it is probably the dust kicked up by colliding comets that survived the death of their stellar host.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ.of Ariz.