For the first time in more than 50 years, NASA launched a mission to the Moon. A lot has changed since 1972, when we last checked in on the enormous, rocky satellite, but there is much to learn—and revisit—when it comes to traveling through deep space and considering what, as NASA describes it, a “long-term return” to our lunar companion could look like. The Artemis II mission, which is currently underway and scheduled to last a total of 10 days, has also released some remarkable images of our home planet.

A striking image of the Earth “setting” behind the cratered Moon takes a truly unique view of our planet and prompts us to consider our perspective. It’s reminiscent of one of the most iconic photographs of all time, known as “Earthrise,” which was snapped by astronaut William Anders during the 1968 Apollo 8 mission—the first crewed trip to the Moon.

Artemis II is scheduled to return to Earth on the evening of April 10, when the crew will splash down into the Pacific Ocean off the California coast.

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There is an air of the spectral to Fiona Pardington’s recent photographs of birds. While they are actual specimens, captured in atmospheric light and exhibiting unique plumage and expressions, there’s something a little bit uncanny about them. Are they real? In a sense, yes, but they’re no longer alive. Some no longer even exist. For Pardington, who is of Māori and Scottish descent, natural history specimens provide a unique and striking look at nature. And the photos seen here, comprising part of her series Taharaki Skyside, are slated for the artist’s exhibition in the Aotearoa New Zealand Pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year.

Pardington’s bold, large-scale portraits of birds native to New Zealand—known as Aotearoa in the Māori language—are all made in natural history collections around the country. The phantom-like depictions detail unique beaks, colors, and biological variations of the Fiordland penguin, with its bright yellow crest that looks like dramatic eyebrows, the South Island Takahe, which was thought extinct for a while before it was rediscovered in 1948, or the Tūī, with its tuft of white at the throat.

Pardington’s series also develops through a literary lens, especially in relation to the poetic works of Dante, who situates Purgatory on an island-mountain in the Southern Hemisphere in the Divine Comedy. The concept of crossing over from one realm to another is mirrored in the uncanniness of preserved animals in vitrines, illustrating the diversity of life while no longer possessing it. “Some birds, like the huia and whēkau (laughing owl), are long extinct; many others remain critically vulnerable,” says a statement.

Pardington’s images, set in museums, harken back to an earlier era of collecting, when egg-hunters and birders would seek prized specimens only to kill them and “preserve” them for posterity. This controversial practice occasionally rears its head, such as in the case of a researcher who killed an elusive kingfisher in 2015 to “collect” it for further research.

“Birds can symbolise familial love, romantic attachment, and ecological warnings. They can be intimations of mortality, and in my work, they can also represent individual people in my life. The ideas I am conjuring remind us of the integral significance of manu within te ao Māori (the Māori world) as sources of food and materials and intermediaries between human and divine worlds,” Pardington says.

Many of the endemic species she highlights are rare, such as the kākā kura, which is a color morph of the more common kākā parrot. And beyond their scientific significance, birds also play a sacred role for the Māori people, who refer to them as manu, messengers between this world and the next. “The ‘captured’ birds also reveal how museums classify, describe, frame, and celebrate or hide cultural narratives, influencing our understanding of the history and cultural legacies of Indigenous communities,” says a statement.

See Taharaki Skyside at the Venice Biennale from May 9 to November 22, and find more on Pardington’s Instagram.

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Wenting Zhu and the team at Beauty of Science have released another visual ode to nature’s processes. “Crystal Garden: Seasons” combines organic compounds and pigments to create a kaleidoscope of colorful growths that spring up and crawl across the tiny, round vessels. Zhu, who is the studio’s lead science artist, writes about the project: “Garden serves as a metaphor for the meeting of the natural and the man-made. A garden is a space where nature and human intention intertwine: neither wholly wild nor entirely artificial.”

Find more on Beauty of Science’s Behance and website. You also might enjoy the studio’s study of molds and salt.

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Decades before the advent of photography, when European scientists and explorers were undertaking global expeditions and collecting flora and fauna from around the world, art and science converged in fields of medicine, anthropology, and natural history. During the Enlightenment, artists like Elizabeth Blackwell, John Gould, and Elizabeth Gould—among many, many others—documented botanicals, avians, insects, marine species, and more, many of which were published in hefty volumes and archived in museum collections.

Sarah Stone (1759-1844) was a British illustrator and the daughter of a fan painter, whose rich depictions of birds and artifacts highlight a singular talent during an era when women weren’t even permitted to be members of London’s prestigious Royal Academy. Nevertheless, she was invited to exhibit four drawings as an “Honorary Exhibitor” when she was 21.

In the 1770s, British businessman and collector Sir Ashton Lever commissioned Stone to paint items in his museum chock-full of natural and ethnographic objects he called the Holophusikon, also known as the Lever Museum. Stone painted objects at Lever’s Holophusikon well into the 1780s, creating a visual chronicle of objects and fauna acquired from all over the world.

Aristocratic private museums were a phenomenon of the Enlightenment, when Britain enjoyed wealth, prestige, and influence, much of which was derived from other parts of the empire and the transatlantic slave trade. Many of today’s institutions, such as the British Museum, began with individuals’ private collections.

Nearly two dozen of the artist’s paintings are currently on view in Sarah Stone’s Unseen World: A Rare Collection of 18th Century Ornithological Watercolours as part of the Master Drawings New York art fair. Surveying a wide range of incredible birds, from the Bornean peacock pheasant to the distinctive orange-and-black rufous treepie.

The exhibition shares its title with a book co-authored by Errol Fuller and art dealer Craig Finch of Finch & Co., which presents the paintings this month. “Like many women painters of her time, Stone produced exquisite watercolour landscapes,” says a statement. “However, she was exceptional in her commercial success, with her paintings sought after by connoisseurs and collectors. In an era when women’s contributions were often overlooked, Stone defied the norm and stood out as a prominent figure.”

Sarah Stone’s Unseen World continues at Peter Harrington Rare Books in Manhattan through February 7.

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In museums everywhere, collections departments are troves of historical objects, art, cultural artifacts, and scientific specimens. In our increasingly digital age, it’s easy to forget that in many cases, a good amount—sometimes even the majority—of records are documented in heavy, physical catalogues or accession registers. And over the course of decades or even centuries, labels can get damaged, items can go awol, or in the worst case scenario, fire or water damage can destroy these valuable resources.

In a sense, these analog databases are just as important as the objects they document, providing information about provenance and materials. In filing drawers, cases, and archival boxes, pieces are labeled one way or another. Archaeological potsherds, for example, may be labeled right on the piece with varnish and ink. At Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, tiny invertebrates are preserved alongside ornate, handwritten labels that harken back to our not-so-distant pre-digital age.

One problem with the old system of analog record-keeping is that access is limited, and only those most intimately acquainted with a particular collection may know that something is there at all. Finding items often requires some old fashioned sleuthing. But thanks to growing online resources, museums are increasingly working to make their holdings more accessible to both researchers and the public.

A new exhibition, Making the Invisible Visible: Digitizing Invertebrates on Microscope Slides, highlights Harvard’s diverse collection comprising more than 50,000 examples. Many are well over 100 years old, including a slide containing a soft coral specimen inscribed with, “sent to James Dwight Dana by Charles Darwin.” Some include whole insects, while others feature only wings or antennae.

The exhibition marks an extension of an ambitious project launched in 2024 to bring the collection into the 21st century by digitizing more than 3,000 specimens. This includes locating, restoring, rehousing, and capturing high-resolution images so that the collection can be published online for use by researchers around the world. Indeed, even the addition of QR code labels to the 19th-century objects is a thought-provoking juxtaposition of historical and contemporary archiving techniques. How will scientists use these another century from now?

Making the Invisible Visible is now on view at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Humans have been creating pigments for thousands of years, foraging for local materials that could be ground or extracted to create colors. The 17,000-year-old cave art in Lascaux, France, for example, is a mindbogglingly early example of human ingenuity when it comes to processing elements of nature, such as minerals, ochres, and shells, to create different hues.

As time went on, people continued to experiment and develop new dyes and paints, some of which were poisonous. Minerals sometimes contain toxic elements, so red often contained lead, cinnabar had mercury, and orpiment arsenic. Aristocratic Romans even used a face-lightening compound containing lead, and their blush tended to feature crushed mulberries or red vermillion, a.k.a. powdered cinnabar.

In the medieval period, plants also became more valuable as a means of producing pigments, especially as trade routes expanded and botanicals from different parts of the world could be obtained or seeded in gardens. The colors we see in illuminated manuscripts and associate with dyed fabrics became increasingly desirable during this era.

Blue and purple can be extracted from woad, ivy, and Portuguese laurel, while golden hues can be made from cornflower, crocus, myrrh, turmeric, and more. In the forthcoming Gold from Newton’s Apple Tree: Historical Recipes for Natural Inks, Paints, and Dyes, author Nabil Ali celebrates this long legacy of botanical pigments and the craft traditions that used them, with an emphasis on the Middle Ages.

Ali compiles recipes from as far back as the 3rd century B.C.E. to as recently as the last couple of decades, reproducing a wide range of scientific and artistic illustrations of a wide range of specimens from manuscripts and encyclopedic volumes. Published by Princeton University Press, Gold from Newton’s Apple Tree takes its title from an ink recipe made from using bark extracted from a descendant of Sir Isaac Newton’s apple tree, in which the brown ingredients transform into a rich yellow-gold.

The book is slated for release in April, and you can pre-order your copy in the Colossal Shop. You might also enjoy The Mushroom Color Atlas.

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As we reflect on 2025, we’re taking a peek into our archive to spotlight some of the stories we’re still thinking about. It’s a joy and a privilege to share so much creativity with you each day, and we’re grateful to know you’re out there reading.

In case you missed it, check out our favorite art books of the year.

—Christopher, Grace, Kate, and Jackie

Uncanny Papier-Mâché Creatures by Roberto Benavidez Mingle in ‘Bosch Beasts’

For Los Angeles-based artist Roberto Benavidez, the art of the piñata is a central tenet of a practice exploring intersecting themes of race, sexuality, humor, sin, and beauty. He draws upon the paper art form’s early religious significance in Mexico, when Spanish missionaries used a seven-pointed version as a tool for converting Indigenous people to Christianity. This motif, which appears in some of Benavidez’s distinctive sculptures, nods to its past colonial use.

Marcel Heijnen Captures Loving Portraits of Feisty, Feral Felines in ‘City Cats of Istanbul’

In some parts of the world, stray animals are nearly as beloved as pets. Thousands of dogs roam the streets of Cusco, Peru, for example, and cats pretty much rule the night in places like Athens, Valletta, and Japan’s “cat islands.” Residents often feed and provide shelter for these roving colonies, and for Dutch photographer Marcel Heijnen, this human-animal connection provides endless opportunities to experience urban centers.

Enjoy the Brilliant Ballet that Brought Dance to the Bauhaus Movement

Given the emphasis on functionality and design for industrial production, the Bauhaus movement is rarely associated with disciplines like dance. But for Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943), translating its principles into movement and performance was as compelling as a well-conceived chair or building.

Among Newly Discovered Ocean Species, a Baby Colossal Squid Is Filmed for the First Time

An archipelago in the South Atlantic known as the South Sandwich Islands is home to some of the most remote landmasses in the world. Uninhabited except for occasional scientific research, their volcanic makeup highlights the geological and ecological diversity of this part of the world, and we still have much to learn. In 2025, Schmidt Ocean Institute completed a 35-day trek on the Falkor (too) to the remote island chain and discovered new hydrothermal vents, coral gardens, and what researchers suspect to be entirely new species. During this expedition, the team also confirmed the sighting of a juvenile colossal squid, capturing one on film for the first time.

Blink and You’d Miss the Moments Topping This Year’s Pure Street Photography Awards

Coincidence is around every corner, and immortalizing a split second of fleeting chaos takes a special eye. Since 2020, Pure Street Photography—an initiative focused on connecting international photographers—has commended visual storytellers through an annual competition.

Nick Cave’s Nearly 26-Foot Bronze Stands for Resistance Amid Oppression

Whether weaving plastic pony beads into a monumental sculpture, adorning figures with mother-of-pearl buttons, or mosaicing ceramic tile across a New York subway station, Nick Cave has continually returned to one question: how does this material help bring people into the work?

More than 7,500 Prints and Negatives by Trailblazing Photographer Alice Austen Return Home

With its panoramic views of New York Harbor, the house that trailblazing photographer Alice Austen (1866-1952) called home for most of her life is a sprawling, two-story, elegant Victorian Gothic waterfront property known as Clear Comfort. From here, she captured thousands of incredible photographs throughout her lifetime. In 2025, the entire archive of Austen’s photos returned to Clear Comfort after being held by a local historical society, thanks to a landmark acquisition.

Through Ceramics, Stephanie Shih Considers the Disillusioning Price of Domestic Bliss

Nothing says true love like arguing about who left the cap off the toothpaste, right? From a darkly comedic perspective, Stephanie Shih explores the multiple meanings of “domestic bliss” in a social landscape fraught with consumerism and clashing politics.

Yuji Agematsu Arranges Street Debris into Tiny Daily Sculptures

Each day, Yuji Agematsu takes a walk for the explicit purpose of scouring the streets. The dried leaf, lost toy, and even the wad of gum discarded on a park bench are his treasures, which he retrieves and places in the clear cellophane that wraps a pack of cigarettes. Although Agematsu no longer smokes, this habit of wandering and collecting has been harder to break: he’s been committed to it since 1996.

Near Liverpool, a One-of-a-Kind Art Environment by Ron Gittins Is Saved

Behind the unassuming red brick facade of a gable-roofed flat in Birkenhead, England, sits a home like no other. The only clue passersby would have had, until recently, was a pair of hand-sculpted figurative columns that flanked the wooden front door. But to step inside this corner flat near Liverpool is to be transported into the imaginative world of Ron Gittins.

Across 92 Screens in Times Square, Yuge Zhou’s ‘Trampoline Color Exercise’ Celebrates Global Unity

Spanning a gridded background of rectangular, pink trampolines, hundreds of gymnasts mesmerizingly flip and twist, shapeshifting as they tuck and tumble. “Trampoline Color Exercise,” a monumental digital video collage installation by Chicago-based artist Yuge Zhou, takes a bird’s-eye view of athletes at peak form while abstracting their bodies and movements into undulating ripples of color.

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From Iceland’s Arctic Henge to snowy forests, the vistas represented in the 2025 Northern Lights Photographer of the Year contest highlight the visual symphony of geomagnetic light phenomena. Paired with distinctive landscapes, the images illuminate our planet’s unique relationship with the sun.

While photographers captured some scenes in subarctic regions where the northern lights are vivid and common, others created images farther south or in the opposite hemisphere, where the phenomenon is known as aurora australis. For example, Jeff Cullen’s portrait of two sea stacks on the coast of Victoria, Australia, is veiled by a bright pink display.

2025 was a great year for spotting the auroras, marked by high levels of geomagnetic activity as the sun reached what’s known as solar maximum. Lasting approximately 12 months, the phase was part of a regular 11-year cycle in which the magnetic poles flip on our Solar System’s star. During this period, the orb transitions from a state of relative calm to stormy turbulence, and the latter is when the auroras become particularly intense, frequent, and visible in more parts of the world.

On Earth, the auroras are created when charged solar particles interact with the planet’s atmosphere, assuming myriad illuminated shapes and motion patterns in magenta, green, purple, red, and blue. Curtain-like stretches may swoop across the sky twist into spiraling forms, while others may appear more like rays or starbursts.

The Northern Lights Photographer of the Year competition aims to showcase both established and emerging photographers, along with highlighting locations where the auroras are less common. Organized by Capture the Atlas, the contest shares the top 25 images of the year on its website.

You might also enjoy perusing the winners of the 2025 Milky Way Photographer of the Year.

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NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has come through yet again with an unprecedented image from our Solar System, this time of a unique pair of Wolf-Rayet stars known as Apep. A Wolf-Rayet is a massive, very hot star that’s in the later stages of its life, quickly losing mass with the help of strong stellar winds. Thanks to Webb, researchers were able to observe coiled shells of dust around the pair for the first time. Previous documentation collected by other telescopes had only ever shown one dust shell.

What makes this observation especially interesting is that there’s actually a third fiery orb at play here, which Webb’s new data confirms is gravitationally bound to the other two in this system. A massive supergiant, this third player “slices” holes into the dust shells—which have been emitted over the last 700 years—creating a unique effect. “To find the holes the third star has cut like a knife through the dust, look for the central point of light and trace a V shape from about 10 o’clock to 2 o’clock,” NASA says.

The celestial phenomena’s name, Apep, references the Egyptian god of chaos. Because while it may appear to be moving slowly, these swirling clouds race at a remarkable speed. “The dust-producing Wolf-Rayet stars in Apep aren’t exactly on a tranquil cruise,” NASA says. “They are whipping through space and sending out dust at 1,200 to 2,000 miles per second.” Because the dust is so dense, it shows up clearly in the image.

“Webb’s data, combined with observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, confirmed that the two Wolf-Rayet stars sail past one another approximately every 190 years,” says a statement. “Over each orbit, they make a close pass for 25 years, producing and spewing amorphous carbon dust.”

Find more on NASA’s website.

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When viewed through early telescopes, some nebula appeared round, so astronomers in the 18th and 19th centuries likened them to planets. These so-called planetary nebulae, having actually nothing to do with planets, are formed when a star—of a type similar to the Sun—emits huge amounts of ionized gases as it reaches the end of its life.

In late October, the James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) captured this dramatic and beautiful phase occurring in what’s known as the Red Spider Nebula, or NGC 6537.

“After ballooning into cool red giants, these stars shed their outer layers and cast them into space, exposing their white-hot cores,” scientists say. Ultraviolet light from the star then causes the material to glow as it’s cast off into space. “The planetary nebula phase of a star’s life is as fleeting as it is beautiful, lasting only a few tens of thousands of years.”

Webb’s newest image of the Red Spider Nebula, named for its wide lobes that form the “legs” of its namesake, shows hot dust likely orbiting the central star. “Though only a single star is visible in the Red Spider’s heart, a hidden companion star may lurk there as well,” a statement says. “A stellar companion could explain the nebula’s shape, including its characteristic narrow waist and wide outflows.”

Learn more on the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope website, where you can explore many more images. (via PetaPixel)

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