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