A little bit of wonder and awe brought to you by Clinton Melander

Dazzling star-filled skies by photographer Noriko Tabuchi 

Gorgeous night photography by Hossein Zare

Today’s dose of wonder and awe comes from photographer John Colbensen 

Nature’s spectrum as seen through the lens of Dariusz Lakomy

Stéphane Guisard captures our obsession with the stars both past and present.

The Starlight Project was an installation created for the 2012 Burning Man by Erich Remash, Jeremy Berglund, Don Peterson and Chad Ingle. It consists of seven stars positioned in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada to represent the constellation of Orion. 

Behold the beautiful star-filled skies captured by photographer Thomas O’Brien

Darkened Cities by Thierry Cohen imagines the starry skies we’d see in urban areas if we turned off all the lights.

About the project:

Before these pictures can exist, the sky from one place has to be superimposed upon cityscape from another. It is impossible to see this detail in the night sky above a city. Atmospheric and light pollution combine to make looking into the urban sky like looking past bright headlights while driving.

By travelling to places free from light pollution but situated on precisely the same latitude as his cities, Cohen obtains skies which, as the world rotates about its axis, are the very ones visible above the cities a few hours earlier or later. To find the right level of atmospheric clarity, Cohen has to go into the wild places of the earth, the Atacama, the Mojave, the western Sahara.

As more and more of the world’s population becomes urban, and as we lose our connection with the natural world, so it becomes plain that damage is caused by light pollution. There may be connections to certain cancers, and there are psychological burdens of permanent day. The ‘city that never sleeps’ is made up of millions of individuals breaking natural cycles of work and repose. Lose sight of the sky, and you become a rat in a lab.

Cohen hasn’t simply shown us the skies that we’re missing. His cities look dead under the fireworks display above No lights in the windows, no tracers of traffic. They are (in fact) photographed in daylight, when lights shine out less brightly. In urban mythology the city teems with energy and illumines everything around it. Cohen’s pictures are crafted to say the opposite. These are cold cities, cut off from the seemingly infinite energies above.

Jaw-droppingly beautiful images of Iceland by Peerakit “Popcity” Jirachetthakun

Star Fields is a new project by Caleb Charland that involves grabbing really pixelated images of deep space from the web, chemically altering them as prints and then rescanning them as high res images.

Spectacular night skies captured by photographer John White.

Magical imagery by Gusti Yogiswara

Fanciful photography by Photoflake (aka Anja Stiegler) 

Starry skies from SevenElevenStudios