Students perform a traditional dance during the Onam festival celebrations in Chennai on August 25, 2023. (Photo by R. Satish Babu/AFP Photo)

A person dressed as the Statue of Liberty pays for a hot dog on a side street near the 51st Annual Village Halloween Parade in New York, New York, USA, 31 October 2024. The annual holiday parade passes through the city's Greenwich Village neighborhood and claims to be the largest Halloween parade in the world. (Photo by Justin Lane/EPA/EFE)

A brig with scarlet sails travels on the Finnish Gulf coast during a rehearsal for the the Scarlet Sails festivities marking school graduation in St. Petersburg, Russia, early Saturday, June 27, 2020. This year the festival will not be held in the city center, but on the Finnish Gulf. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, there will be no spectators but the event will be broadcast on television. (Photo by Dmitri Lovetsky/AP Photo)

A worker, dressed in a protective suit, cleans Conchitas Beach contaminated by an oil spill, in Ancon, Peru, Thursday, January 20, 2022. The oil spill on the Peruvian coast was caused by the waves from an eruption of an undersea volcano in the South Pacific nation of Tonga. (Photo by Martin Mejia/AP Photo)

A fashion lovers walks in the courtyard of the Louvre museum during Louis Vuitton ready-to-wear Spring/Summer 2023 fashion collection presented Tuesday, October 4, 2022 in Paris. (Photo by Christophe Ena/AP Photo)

Some of the best entries so far in the 2016 Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. There are two weeks left to enter, and the winners will be announced in September. Here: Aurora over Laksvatn Fjord, Laksvatn, Norway. The aurora borealis dances in the skies over the town of Laksvatn, with the Milky Way to the left. The image is a single shot with no compositing, only post-processing to bring out the aurora, and some colour corrections. The photographer Matt Walford said: “I love the way the northern lights look like they are just wistfully dancing over the fjord, framed by the mountains on either side”. (Photo by Matt Walford/National Maritime Museum)

People walk on the street before the opening ceremony of the Witches and Wizards Convention, in the Paranapiacaba village, in Santo Andre, Brazil on May 16, 2025. (Photo by Jean Carniel/Reuters)

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)