An observer watches the Perseid meteor shower at Mount Hamilton in California, United States on August 13, 2023. (Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Australian ballet dancer Marilyn Rowe prepares to perform Swan Lake with the Australian Ballet at the Canberra Theatre in 1978. Rowe was appointed director of the Australian Ballet School in 1999. (Photo by John Crowther/The Guardian)
Multiple lightning strikes are seen in this 66 image composite taken over 1.5 hours during a monsoon in Bangkok, Thailand which took place overnight from October 29th to October 30th, 2024. The monsoon season in Bangkok normally lasts from July to October, making this one of the year's last major storms to hit the Thai capital. (Photo by Adryel Talamantes/ZUMA Press Wire/Rex Features/Shutterstock)
Tourists pose for a selfie in Cancun, October 13, 2015. Cancun's transformation in the 1970s from a small Caribbean fishing village into a strip of nightclubs and high-rise hotels has reduced biodiversity and polluted water resources as infrastructure struggles to keep up. (Photo by Edgard Garrido/Reuters)
Our moon is a pretty big object. It's big enough to be a respectable planet in its own right, if it were orbiting the sun instead of the Earth. (Actually, it is orbiting the sun in a nearly perfectly circular orbit, that the Earth only slightly perturbs... but that's a topic for another day.) The Moon is a quarter the diameter of the Earth. Only Pluto has a satellite that is larger, in proportion to the size of the planet it orbits.
This aerial picture taken on the night of November 12, 2018 shows traffic on an elevated intersection in downtown Shanghai, China. (Photo by Johannes Eisele/AFP Photo)