// NATURE NEWS — SPAZIO & SCIENZA
Gaze into the cosmos and through the eyes of a bee — September’s best science images
The month’s sharpest science shots, selected by Nature’s photo team.
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.
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.
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.