Shaping Light

The interplay of light and glass as the light transmits and reflects adds an extra dimension to this detail of a black-and-white glass ribbon sculpture exhibited at the Corning Museum of Glass, NY, USA.

—Catalin Florea, Lockheed Martin Space  Glass sculpture: “Between fragments and  whole, Sphere,” by Jeannet Iskander

01 Nov 2025

Salty Desolation

Landsat 8 image of the salt pan in Etosha National Park, Namibia, one of the largest in the world. The horizontal line across the image is the park fence. The wild patterns in this IR interpretation are from numerous episodes of water evaporation following seasonal rains. The surrounding blue shades are dry bushland savanna.  

—USGS Landsat 8, data acquired 03/04/2014

01 Oct 2025

IR Filter on Artificial Tears

An IR filter (750–900 nm), placed in the center of a micrograph of artificial tear crystals with the field diaphragm fully open, reveals multiple wavelengths—from infrared in the center of the crystals to violet on the outer circumference.

—Baruc Zago Mazzocco, Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica Óptica y Electrónica, San Andrés Cholula, Mexico

01 Sep 2025

Polynomial Beauty

A 2D histogram on the complex plane of the number of solutions from a given set of polynomials generated from a set of 7×7 matrices. The heat map can be interpreted as a plot of the probability that a random matrix will have a characteristic polynomial with a solution in a certain location.  

—Trra02, Wiki Science Competition 2023; CC-BY-4.0

01 Jul 2025

Milky Way dust emission

Milky Way dust emission as measured from the Planck satellite and converted into a polarization pattern of B-modes, a spiral type of polarization imprinted in the microwave sky.  

—Uroš Seljak, University of California, Berkeley, USA,  Winner Wiki Science Competition 2019; CC-BY-4.0

01 Jun 2025

Fruit fly retina

Confocal image of a fruit fly retina expressing a toxic form of the RdgB protein, leading to degeneration.

—Guilliaume Thuery, Ireland,  Wiki Science Competition 2023;  CC-BY-4.0

01 May 2025

Far-UV photo of Earth

On 21 April 1972, NASA’s Apollo 16 mission took a far-ultraviolet photo of Earth with an ultraviolet camera. The original black-and-white picture was printed on Agfacontour professional film three times, with each exposure recording only one light level. The three light levels were then colored blue (dimmest), green (next brightest) and red (brightest), resulting in the enhanced-color image seen here.

—Apollo 16 Far UV Camera, G. Carruthers, NASA

01 Apr 2025

Butterfly Wings 

In a dark room with no external source of light, a beam of light through a pinhole creates the illusion of a butterfly. Using multicolored LEDs results in a beautiful shape.[OPN 2024 Photo Contest]  

—Sritam Kumar Sethy, M.pharma Student,  Balasore, Odisha, India   

01 Mar 2025

Spectral flame

A CD has the effect of a diffraction grating on candlelight, separating its constituent colors.  

—Adriana Pedrosa Biscaia Tufaile, Soft Matter Lab, EACH, University of São Paulo City, São Paulo, Brazil

01 Feb 2025