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  1. Games

57 amazing space screenshots for your desktop

Features
By Ian Birnbaum published 9 September 2016

Incredible sights from EVE, Star Citizen, Mass Effect, and more.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

It’s hard to picture space without getting a bit romantic and philosophical. Looking up at the stars is arguably humanity’s oldest form of entertainment. Space reminds us who we are, who we were, and who we’re trying to be. Space gives us distance and perspective from our pale blue dot, and it invites us to our most dangerous challenges.

A lot of our favorite games are set in space, and it’s no coincidence that many of those games are absurdly gorgeous. We want to look at beautiful space pictures all the time, so we rounded up the best shots on the web and brought them all to one place.

Some of these pictures have run on PC Gamer before, usually captured by screenshot maestro Andy Kelly in pixel-boosted 4K glory. We found others by crawling through subreddits and Steam community groups in search of awe-inspiring starships and nebulas. All of them are worthy of adorning your desktop.

Want 'em all? We've packaged the whole lot of hi-res images as a zip file.

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TOPICS
Best of
PRODUCTS
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Ian Birnbaum
Read more
This 'tediously accurate' map of our solar system with the moon scaled to a single pixel would still take 665 monitors laid end-to-end to show all at once
 
 
Alien ambassadors sit around a circular, white table with a holographic display of a ringed planet hovering above its centre.
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Stellar Blade salute
Samsung says you'll soon be able to see Stellar Blade in, err, all its glory on its glasses-free 3D monitor, which I'm sure absolutely no-one will be weird about
 
 
There's still no sign of Star Citizen 1.0, but it did just get a revamped referral program so the die-hards can tempt in even more saps
 
 
A Wildgate prospector floats in the vacuum between two spaceships in combat.
Keep an eye on Wildgate, a PvP space FPS out later this month: Solo queuing can be rough, but it's still cool as hell to join a ragtag group of scavengers in space
 
 
A close-up of an android figure.
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