Gaze into the cosmos and through the eyes of a bee — September’s best science images

Cosmic curiosities. Stargazer Ali Alobaidly collected 28 hours of observation from the Kuwait desert to create this composite image of the Shark Nebula, a dusty region 200 parsecs (650 light years) from the Sun. His image took the top spot in the ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition.

In the competition’s Our Sun category, a shot named Active Region 4122 came first. Miguel Claro captured the sunspot through a telescope from Reguengos de Monsaraz, Portugal.

The winner in the Skyscapes category was Botswana Star Trail. Stefano Pellegrini stacked up 340 separate exposures from an August night in 2025 to reveal the sky’s motion over the country’s Nxai Pan National Park from under a canopy of baobab trees (Adansonia spp.).

In the Our Moon category, Petr Horalek won with this timelapse of the Moon passing directly in front of Venus, titled Venusian Pearl, shot during the day. “It looked like a bright pearl on the lunar limb," said Horalek, who took the sequence in Seč in the Czech Republic.

Radoslav Sviretsov’s The Crown topped the Aurorae category. It shows the Aurora Borealis — a mesmerizing display of glowing lights caused by electrically charged particles from the Sun colliding with Earth’s atmosphere — over a small church in Iceland.

Ali Alobaidly

Funerary platform. This is no ordinary tomb. The monumental burial site archaeologists unearthed at Peru’s Chan Chan archaeological complex contain the remains of 38 individuals of high social status, each buried with artefacts made of shell, metal and other materials. One person was buried with their body fully extended, a highly unusual arrangement for Chimú burials, which tend to have the bodies in seated or curled-up positions. Chan Chan was the capital of the Chimú Empire, which ruled over a stretch of coastal Peru before being taken over by the Inca Empire in the fifteenth century.

Peruvian Ministry of Culture/Latin America News Agency via Reuters

Barrel jellyfish. During a dive, video journalist Martina Birrer spotted a crab stuck in the tentacles of a barrel jellyfish (Rhizostoma pulmo). Birrer was on an expedition on a Sea Shepherd Conservation Society ship in Greece’s Thracian sea. Biologists study R. pulmo to learn more about the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activity of some of the animal’s peptides.

Martina Birrer/Sea Shepherd Global

Zipping DNA. This image caught for the first time two helical double strands of DNA in the act of ‘zipping up’ next to each other — despite both having negative electrostatic charges that would usually repel each other¹. Computer simulations helped to confirm that the groove-to-groove pairing seen in this atomic-force micrograph is facilitated by positive ions, such as those of calcium and magnesium, that get stuck in between the two units. “These regions may become particularly important when mutations disrupt normal cellular processes and contribute to cancer,” says Agnes Noy, a biophysicist at the University of York, UK, and one of the researchers involved in the work.

Agnes Noy, University of York

Insect eyes. Stepping inside the Pollenarium, an installation by British artist Luke Jerram, reveals the world through more than 100 lenses, each of which is an inflated nylon ball working as a pinhole camera. The effect is meant to suggest how insects see the world through their composite eyes. “I’ve created Pollenarium to be a bit like going inside a bee’s head,” Jerram told The Guardian newspaper.

From the outside, however, the structure is yellow and resembles a grain of pollen. Jerram hopes that the experience will raise awareness of the importance of pollinating insects and the reported decline of their populations across the world. Jerram’s piece is being exhibited at sites around the United Kingdom.

Joseph Okpako/Getty

All tucked in. Blankets of wool are the latest desperate measure to keep glaciers from disappearing — or at least to slow down their demise. ⁠Researchers at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, and the Summit Foundation, an environmental group in nearby Vevey, are experimenting with thick woollen blankets to slow down the melting of snow on the Tsanfleuron Glacier in the western Alps. The project aims to find an environmentally friendly substitute for the synthetic tarpaulins that have been deployed on some Swiss glaciers, and to find a use for some of the country’s wool output, at least 40% of which is discarded every year, according to Reuters.

Here kitty. Smaller than a domestic cat and covered in leopard spots, this predator from the eastern slope of the Bolivian Andes is the first new felid to be described scientifically in more than 100 years². Biologist Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz at the National Natural History Museum of Bolivia in La Paz, had initially identified it as an oncilla (Leopardus tigrinus). But she began to suspect it was a different species, and she and her collaborators conducted a genomic analysis of the animal and its relatives — including eight genomes from museum specimens. They found it to be new to science and named it Leopardus tilcayo: tilcayo is the common name given to the animal by the local population.

Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark

Lost civilizations. A calamitous flood that struck the China–Nepal border on 26 August left behind what, in places, looks like the archaeological remains of an ancient civilization. Scientists say that thawing permafrost — possibly caused by human-induced warming — could have caused a glacier upstream of the Bhotekoshi River to suddenly collapse, sending mud, water and rocks down the valley, obliterating anything in their path. At least 1,454 people have been reported dead, with more than 5,600 still missing.

Orbit achieved. The tallest and most powerful launch vehicle ever built has successfully reached orbit, on its first attempt. SpaceX’s Starship, which comprises a first-stage booster and an upper-stage spacecraft, lifted off on 28 September from the company’s base in Texas. The booster, designed to be reusable, experienced engine trouble after it separated from the spacecraft. Thespacecraft continued its ascent as planned, although one of its six engines then shut down. Starship still completed two orbits, deployed satellites to SpaceX’s Starlink network and performed a successful reentry before splashing down in the northern Pacific Ocean. It remained in space for 3 hours, rather than the 10 originally planned. Reusable-rocket flight has become routine for the company’s smaller Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, but Starship’s development has hit some bumps on the road, with 5 of 13 previous launches resulting in what the company euphemistically calls ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’.

REUTERS/Steve Nesius

Watch the heavens from under a mountain. This is not an oversize silo — it is a cavern dug in rock 650 metres under Nijuugo Mountain in central Japan. Starting in 2028, the Hyper-Kamiokande neutrino detector will be filled with 260,000 tonnes of water, which will collect the subatomic particles from a variety of sources, including an artificial beams and supernova explosions. Excavation was completed in mid-2025, and workers finished installing the cavern lining two months ago. Hyper-Kamiokande is five times larger than its sister detector Super-Kamiokande, where neutrino oscillations were discovered — which showed that neutrinos have mass. The finding earned the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics.

higgstan.com, ICRR