A star-spangled spectator takes in a perfect Sunday afternoon, November 3, 2024 for stock-car racing. About 50,000 fans turned up for Sunday afternoon’s Xfinity 500 at Martinsville Speedway in Ridgeway, Virginia. (Photo by Lauren Caulk/The Guardian)

Gorgeous galaxies and stunning stars make up this selection of pictures from the shortlisted entries for this year’s Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year award. The winners will be announced on 15 September, and an exhibition of the winning images will be will be displayed in a free exhibition at the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Centre from 17 September. Here: “Seven Magic Points”. The rusty red swirls of the circular, iron sculpture Seven Magic Points in Brattebergan, Norway mirror the rippling aurora above. (Photo by Rune Engebø/Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2016/National Maritime Museum)

An incredible view of Thunderstorms light up the insides of clouds near a beautiful sky line. This is truly heavenly weather as pictures taken from an airplane cockpit reveal what pilots see from above. It looks like at cruising altitude the weather really hots up, with the flight deck revealing some amazing scenes. Thunderstorms light up the insides of clouds, lightening streaks across the sky like cracks in a windscreen, the northern lights sweep uninterrupted across the sky and the galaxy stretches on forever. The pictures were captured by senior first officer Christiaan van Heijst, a 33-year-old from the Netherlands, and his friend Daan Krans. (Photo by Christiaan van Heijst/Daan Krans/Caters News Agency)

Inside the new Digital Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan on June 21, 2018. These incredible photos show what it looks like inside a groundbreaking new digital art museum in Japan. A trip to the Mori Building Digital Art Museum: teamLab Borderless in Tokyo, which opened last week, can make you feel like they you are dreaming and aims to fully immerse visitors in the art. Spanning a spacious 10,000 square metres, 520 computers and 470 high-tech projectors create the illusion that the visitor is wandering through rice fields, following shoals of fish or even bouncing on a galaxy of planets. (Photo by South West News Service)

Earlier this year, Belgian film-maker and artist Vincent Bal stumbled upon an uncanny resemblance to an elephant in the shadow of his tea cup. This gave him the idea for Shadowology, a series of doodles that interact with the shadows of simple, everyday objects: a banknote, some ice cubes and a flower, for example, can turn into a church, a woman and a hippy. “I draw a few lines and I get my image. It’s really the shadows that inspire me”, Bal says. Here: “Stonedog”. (Photo by Vincent Bal/The Guardian)

Photographer Loes Heerink spent hours waiting on bridges in Hanoi to capture the street vendors who walked underneath. She recently launched a Kickstarter project to publish a book of these images. Here: “In Hanoi there are a lot of street vendors who roam the city with their bicycles trying to sell goods, from vegetables to flowers”. (Photo by Loes Heerink/The Guardian)

Afghanistan, published by Taschen later July, is a retrospective portfolio of the Magnum photographer Steve McCurry’s most striking images of the country, from 1979 to 2016. Here: Kunar province, 1980. Armed mujahideen carry animal skins to use as inflatable buoys to cross rapids. (Photo by Steve McCurry/Taschen/Magnum Photos/The Guardian)

For more than 2,000 years, women from the Baiga tribe in the highland district of Dindori, in central India’s Madhya Pradesh state, have been tattooed. Sumintra, 25, from Bona village, has the markings across her forehead, legs and arms. The women who work as tattoo artists are knowledgable about the different types of designs and pigments preferred by various tribes, and their meanings are passed to them by their mothers. The tattooing ‘season’ begins with the approach of winter. (Photo by Ronny Sen/WaterAid/The Guardian)