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Mugger crocodile (Crocodylus palustris), Gal Oya Reservoir, Sri Lanka.

Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What is the cause of this unusual parabolic structure? This illuminated cavity, known as LDN 1471, was created by a newly forming star, seen as the bright source at the peak of the parabola. This protostar is experiencing a stellar outflow which is then interacting with the surrounding material in the Perseus Molecular Cloud, causing it to brighten. We see only one side of the cavity -- the other side is hidden by dark dust. The parabolic shape is caused by the widening of the stellar-wind blown cavity over time. Two additional structures can also be seen either side of the protostar; these are known as Herbig-Haro objects, again caused by the interaction of the outflow with the surrounding material. What causes the striations on the cavity walls, though, remains unknown. The featured image was taken by NASA and ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope after an original detection by the Spitzer Space Telescope. Explore Your Universe: Random APOD Generator

Ice crystals on barbed wire in Hausdülmen, Dülmen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.

Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

The night side of Pluto spans this shadowy scene. In the stunning spacebased perspective the Sun is 4.9 billion kilometers (almost 4.5 light-hours) behind the dim and distant world. It was captured by far flung New Horizons in July of 2015 when the spacecraft was at a range of some 21,000 kilometers from Pluto, about 19 minutes after its closest approach. A denizen of the Kuiper Belt in dramatic silhouette, the image also reveals Pluto's tenuous, surprisingly complex layers of hazy atmosphere. Near the top of the frame the crescent twilight landscape includes southern areas of nitrogen ice plains now formally known as Sputnik Planitia and rugged mountains of water-ice in the Norgay Montes.

Entrance to the Shazdeh Garden (meaning the Prince`s Garden in Mahan), a historical garden near Mahan, Iran. The 5.5 hectares big garden was built for Mohammad Hassan Khan Sardari Iravani ca. 1850 and was entirely remodeled and extended around 1870 during the eleven years of his governorship in the Qajar dynasty.

Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

Claude Monet ( 1840 – 1926) was a French painter and founder of impressionism painting who is seen as a key precursor to modernism. He was known as the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the impressionism's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions of nature, especially as applied to plein air (outdoor) landscape painting. More

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Put on your red/blue glasses and gaze across the western Ocean of Storms on the surface of the Moon. The 3D anaglyph features Apollo 12 astronaut Pete Conrad visiting the Surveyor 3 spacecraft in November of 1969. Surveyor 3 had landed at the site on the inside slope of a small crater about 2 1/2 years earlier in April of 1967. Visible on the horizon beyond the far crater wall, Apollo 12's Lunar Module Intrepid touched down less than 200 meters (650 feet) away, easy moonwalking distance from the robotic Surveyor spacecraft. This stereo image was carefully created from two separate pictures (AS12-48-7133, AS12-48-7134) captured on the lunar surface. They depict the scene from only slightly different viewpoints, approximating the separation between human eyes.

Olive-bellied sunbird (Cinnyris chloropygius) flying from a flower to another at Kibale forest National Park, Uganda. The bird is looking at the flower on the right to choose it before landing on it.

Giles Laurent, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

A great nebulous region near bright star omicron Persei offers this study in cosmic contrasts. Captured in the telescopic frame the colorful complex of dust, gas, and stars spans about 3 degrees on the sky along the edge of the Perseus molecular cloud some 1000 light-years away. Surrounded by a bluish halo of dust reflected starlight, omicron Persei itself is just left of center. Immediately below it lies the intriguing young star cluster IC 348 recently explored by the James Webb Space Telescope. In silhouette against the diffuse reddish glow of hydrogen gas, dark and obscuring interstellar dust cloud Barnard 3 is at upper right. Of course the cosmic dust also tends to hide newly formed stars and young stellar objects or protostars from prying optical telescopes. At the Perseus molecular cloud's estimated distance, this field of view would span about 50 light-years.

Photo by Ashraf Abu Sara

Lightning strikes over the Presidential Palace, in Brasília. After the terrorist attacks of ISIS on different cities in France, Brazil expresses its sympathy by displaying the colors of the French flag on the Palácio da Alvorada. Nov 13, 2015.

Dasfour2022, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

A mere 56 million light-years distant toward the southern constellation Fornax, NGC 1365 is an enormous barred spiral galaxy about 200,000 light-years in diameter. That's twice the size of our own barred spiral Milky Way. This sharp image from the James Webb Space Telescope's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) reveals stunning details of this magnificent spiral in infrared light. Webb's field of view stretches about 60,000 light-years across NGC 1365, exploring the galaxy's core and bright newborn star clusters. The intricate network of dusty filaments and bubbles is created by young stars along spiral arms winding from the galaxy's central bar. Astronomers suspect the gravity field of NGC 1365's bar plays a crucial role in the galaxy's evolution, funneling gas and dust into a star-forming maelstrom and ultimately feeding material into the active galaxy's central, supermassive black hole.

Nature reserve Petgatten De Feanhoop. German Herkules windmill in Petgatten de Feanhoop. Year of construction 1926.

Agnes Monkelbaan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.