Indian folk dancers display ornaments during a break while participating in the first night of Navratri in Gandhinagar, some 30 km from Ahmedabad, on October 13, 2015. Navratri festivities, or Dance Festival of Nine Nights, takes place between October 13-21. (Photo by Sam Panthaky/AFP Photo)

Indian brides and grooms wait for the start of a mass wedding in New Delhi on June 15, 2014. Some 92 low-income and disabled couples tied the knot in a free mass wedding ceremony organised by the non-profit organisation Narayan Sewa Sansthan. (Photo by Chandan Khanna/AFP Photo)

A Kurdish girl wears her relative's assault rifle and ammunition belt as she waits at the Iraqi Kurdish Shaqouli checkpoint, some 35 kilometres east of Mosul, on November 10, 2016. Since the start of the Mosul offensive the Kurds have moved their border some 10 kms closer to Iraq's second city, marking it out with a line in the sand. (Photo by Odd Andersen/AFP Photo)

A sinkhole is seen on the shore of the Dead Sea near Kibbutz Ein Gedi, Israel July 27, 2015. The Dead Sea is shrinking, and as its waters vanish at a rate of more than one meter a year, hundreds of sinkholes, some the size of a basketball court, some two storeys deep, are devouring land where the shoreline once stood. (Photo by Amir Cohen/Reuters)

A talented body painter has created a series of mind-bending illusions that cover entire torsos. Natalie Fletcher’s work are enough to make people double-take, the spiraling patterns of some appearing to fade into the abyss. In other works, the artists designs look as though they are never ending, while some show body parts appearing to protrude from models chests. The idea behind the ongoing series came to Natalie, 30, as a means of keeping entertained during the winter months. Here: Optical illusion bodypaint. (Photo by Natalie Fletcher/Cater News)

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)

The Smilovichi Felting Factory in Belarus was founded in 1928, when Smilovichi was a small Jewish settlement of craftsmen. Five of those craftsmen organized a small artel (a cooperative association of craftsmen who all live and work together), which produced warm boots called “valenki” for cold weather. Photo: Belarusian workers works at a felt boot factory in Smilovichi, some 35km from Minsk, Belarus, 16 January 2012. (Photo by Tatyana Zenkovich/EPA)