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Upon completion, the Giant Magellan Telescope will boast a resolving power 10 times greater than that of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. This is just an artist’s rendering, but the real thing is expected to be up and running in northern Chile in 2020.
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The Cygnus Wall is one of the highest concentrations of star formations in the North American Nebula. It’s located approximately 1,800 light-years away from Earth. This picture was taken by veteran astrophotographer Bill Snyder over an 18-hour period.
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This picture was taken on a game drive in the Addo Elephant National Park, the third largest national park in the Eastern Cape, South Africa,” photographer Natalie Murray, who entered the photo in this year’s National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest, said. “The park contains a wide diversity of fauna, flora and landscapes and incorporates semi arid landscapes all the way to a marine reserve. These zebra were so calm and you just got the feeling they wanted to be photographed!
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Giant mirrors installed on a Norwegian mountainside will be used for the first time to bring sunlight to the town of Rjukan during winter. Rjukan, shaded by mountains, doesn’t receive direct sunlight between September and March; the mirrors adjust to follow the sun and reflect light down onto the town.
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Sleep researchers found that channels (seen in blue in the image below) are created by shrinking neurons to allow waste to be flushed out of the brain during sleep. The resulting image was a beautiful network of colors.
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A cafe outside of Aquas Calientes in the Cuzco region of Peru has perches for wild parrots that come and feed on seed and fruit left out for them,” said photographer Adam Lichtcsien, who entered this image into the National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest. “This curious little fella was peeking out from behind a leaf to get a better look at me. Apparently he was entertained by the odd human with the camera because he let me get only a few inches away, where my ring light could better illuminate his beautiful feathers.
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In May, scientists captured the first images of the hydrogen bond, which holds our DNA together and gives water its unique properties, including surface tension.
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The Strokkur geyser in Iceland erupts every four to eight minutes, blasting water up to 130 feet into the air. Hot magma under the Earth heats water until it spews out of a hole in the ground.
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Here’s the Aurora borealis photographed in the early morning hours in the Arctic Circle. Also known as the Northern Lights, the spectacular light show is created when fast-moving charged particles from the sun hit the Earth’s magnetic field at its poles. The image was published in the new book, “Beautiful World,” by Lonely Planet.
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Chicago monument “Cloud Gate,” better known as “the bean,” wore a layer of ice as a major blizzard dropped just under 10 inches of snow on Chicago in March.
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This satellite picture of China from October shows just how bad its smog problem is. Monitors say that air pollution reached up to 40 times the standard set by the World Health Organization in some parts of the country.
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Recording-breaking blooms of the algae Enteromorpha prolifera washed up on China’s beaches in Shandong province over the summer. It’s not toxic to people, but it is to other marine life, hogging most of the oxygen in the ecosystem and doing a fair amount of damage.
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The Olinguito was the first carnivorous mammal discovered in the Americas in the last 35 years. A relative of the raccoon, the Olinguito is super adorable.
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More than 10,000 fish were found dead this fall in a lake in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. The cause? Sewage and waste pouring in from a drain. This is not the first time this has happened in Shenzen — last year 50,00 fish were found floating in a pond near an industrial area.
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This composite image, taken in November during a solar eclipse, shows the sun behind the moon, combined with the outflow of the solar corona — the charged particles flowing out of the sun’s surface that we see during the eclipse when the actual mass of the star is obscured.
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Firefighters put out a raging fire in a Chicago warehouse on Jan. 23, but the bitter cold temperatures turned it into an ice castle.
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Eruptions at Mount Etna this year have changed the shape of its vent, causing it to blow perfect 100-meter-wide (328 feet) smoke rings.
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This year the public discovered that Glass Gem corn, a unique variety of rainbow-colored corn, can be purchased online through Native Seeds/SEARCH, a non-profit conservation organization.
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A geologist collects samples in the Utah desert for the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in March. The MDRS aims to investigate the feasibility of a human exploration of Mars and uses Utah’s Mars-like terrain to simulate working conditions on the red planet.
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Journalist Justin Catanoso accompanied tropical biologist Miles Silman and his team on a hike through Manu National Park to experience the wonders of Peru’s tropical forests. A breathtaking 13,000 feet above sea level, they started their hike above the clouds.
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Astronomers spotted an asteroid in September with comet-like tails, something they’ve never seen before. Even though comets and asteroids come from the same place, they differ based on what they are made of as well as their orbits. One theory for this odd occurrence is that the asteroid could be rotating so fast that dust is slipping off the surface of the rock and flying out into space.
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In January, Sir Ranulph Fiennes and his five-man team set off to cross the Antarctic continent during the winter months — a trek that had never been attempted before. Here, their ship reaches the first pack ice, large pieces of ice that have been pushed together into a single mass.
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The first high-resolution global map of changes in forest cover over the last 12 years shows which parts of the world are losing forests at an alarming rate. Between 2000 and 2012, 888,000 square miles (an area roughly the size of Mexico and Arizona combined) of forest was lost, while just 309,000 square miles (an area about half the size of Alaska) of new forest was established.
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Using two sets of data from the European Space Observatory’s (ESO) VISTA telescope, scientists were able to make the most accurate 3D map yet of the bulge of the Milky Way. The three-dimensional location in the map resulted in this fabulous artist’s impression.
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A rare 18-foot-long dead oarfish was found in October, in Toyon Bay off the Catalina Island. It took 15 adults to haul the silvery fish out of the water and up to the beach.
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German photographer Wolf Ademeit took this photo at a local zoo. He spent a lot of time getting to know the primates, whom he saw display love, sadness, fun, and violence.
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Paleontologists revealed in November that they’d discovered a new dinosaur, the Lythronax argestes, identified as a cousin of the Tyrannosaurus and whose name means “king of gore.”
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In September, visitors took pictures of tidal waves created by a severe typhoon in Hangzhou, in Zhejiang province of China. The storm killed two people in the Philippines and injured nine people in Taiwan.
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Nick Brandt took mesmerizing photographs of birds and bats at Tanzania’s Lake Natron that look as if they have turned to stone. They’re not really stone, but have been made “rock hard” from the high levels of soda ash and salt in the lake
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A photographer from the United States watched a female jaguar attack a male companion near a river in Brazil, and caught the moment on film. The image won a spot in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition.
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Business Insider’s Robert Johnson took this picturesque photo during a tour of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It’s a stark contrast to the gloomy life led by the prisoners, and even some of the troops, who reside there.
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NASA released this incredible hypercolor map of Mercury, the first full map of the sun’s closest planetary neighbor. The Messenger probe snapped it as it flew by the planet on its way through the solar system.
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The Corona Fire Department, battling a wildfire about 90 miles away from Los Angeles that started in August, posted photos of its efforts to its Facebook page, including this incredible shot of a DC-10 air tanker flying over a residential area
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This photograph of a thunderstorm at False Kiva, Utah, was the second-place winner of the 2013 National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest.
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NASA’s Cassini spacecraft clicked a cosmic shot of Earth from far beyond Saturn. This is only the third time in history we’ve gotten this chance to take a picture from this far out in our solar system.
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Seismologists discovered an active volcano hidden beneath a massive ice sheet in West Antarctica in November. This is the first time anyone has caught magma in action so far from the coast.
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A photographer captured this photo of a pig swimming near boats at Big Major Cay in the Bahamas. People brought them to the island years ago, and they show no fear of boats since they get a lot of free food that way. The image was entered in the National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest.
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A remote camera was probably just a few feet in front of this frog when it jumped up and photobombed NASA’s LADEE launch in Virginia. A representative from the Wallops/Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport confirmed that the photo is real, and said the frog was probably spooked by the launch noises.
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A submarine about the size of a baseball bat has given researchers access to Antarctica’s subglacial Lake Whillans, one of the last unexplored places on Earth. A video camera on the mini-sub captured this view as it descended a 2,600-foot-deep borehole to explore and capture images of the lake for the first time.
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British photographer Tim Flach created a series called “More Than Human,” which captures the emotions of wild creatures through intensely close shots, including this stunning picture of a tiger drying off.
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This magnified image of a veiled chameleon embryo has been stained to highlight the cartilage (blue) and bone (red). It was a Nikon Small World Photography contest winner in October.
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A field of parked cars and trucks sits partially submerged near Greeley, Colo., in September after floods destroyed an area the size of Connecticut.
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Indonesia’s Mount Sinabung, which has been actively spewing lava and ash for the last couple of months, erupted six times on Nov. 25. A Reuters photographer took this eerie photo in the early morning of November 25.
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Dr. Kieran Boyle of the University of Glasgow in Scotland took this image of a brain cell in the hippocampus as it received excitatory contacts. It was a finalist in Nikon’s Small World Photography contest.
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A farmer searches for sheep caught in a snow drift in Northern Ireland in March. A heavy snowfall last winter caused snowdrifts of up to 18 feet, leaving at least 140,000 homes and businesses in Northern Ireland without power.
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British ice cream wizard Charlie Francis created a glow-in-the-dark ice cream using synthesized jellyfish proteins — the same ones that allow these marine animals to produce light inside their bodies. It costs $220 a scoop.
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A pilot took this photo of the Soyuz spacecraft, which carried the Olympic torch on its way to Sochi, upon its return to Earth.
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An aerial photo captures the beauty of Croatia’s Plitvice Lakes National Park. The park is made up of cascading lakes that range in color from green to blue to grey. The lakes were created when shallow basins formed by the elements filled with water, a natural phenomenon.
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Sergey Gorshkov of Russia photographed Plosky Tolbachik, a volcano in central Russia, from a helicopter when it erupted last November for the first time in 36 years. The image won a spot in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition.
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Every year the London Zoo weighs and measures its animals — a process that takes quite a long time for the zoo’s 19,000 residents. Here, a keeper uses worms to entice Tammy, a tamandua, to stay on the scale.
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