A hot air-balloon flies during the International Lorraine Mondial Air Balloons Festival, in Chambley-Bussieres, eastern France, Friday, July 26, 2013. (Photo by Mathieu Cugnot/AP Photo)

A hot-air balloon flies over Metropolitan Park during the International Hot-Air Balloon Festival in Leon, state of Guanajuato, Mexico, on November 16, 2024. (Photo by Henry Romero/Reuters)

This strange coral-looking specimen is actually a mushroom. The photo, “Beautiful Destroyer”, was taken in the Panamanian tropical rainforest where the mushroom produces nitrogen, an element vital to soil health. (Photo by Sarah A. Batterman)

A radio-controlled flying witch makes a test flight past a moon setting into clouds along the pacific ocean in Carlsbad, California October 8, 2014. Reuters was invited to photograph the testing of the life sized device by inventor Otto Dieffenbach lll. (Photo by Mike Blake/Reuters)

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)

Night lovers; Hormozgan province, Iran. “In this picture, you can see the Milky Way rising on a fascinating spring night on the Persian Gulf coast. The stunning cliffs of this area make every viewer imagine and even talk to them! The light pollution from a faraway city was quite strong, so it was a challenging post-processing process. I’m a nightscaper who tries to achieve an artistic look in my images, and in this image, I tried to convey and capture the magic of this location”. (Photo by Mohammad Hayati/Milky Way Photographer of the Year)

A flying lemur glides through the air in West Java, Indonesia in the first decade of October 2023. The photographer said the animal veered away from him at the last minute. (Photo by Dzul Dzulfikri/Animal News Agency)