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Flying over a Montana pine forest during the first snowfall of the year

Expanse of clouds

Ruup Students of Estonian Academy of Arts 

“Gigantic wooden megaphones” for the forest inhabit a clearing in Estonia's Pähni Nature Centre. They are part of an acoustic installation meant to amplify the sounds of the landscape, serve as outdoor classrooms or just provide shelter to a weary hiker.

Images Tõnu Tunnel

Thousand-year-old Viking fortress reveals a technologically advanced society

When archaeologists uncovered four ancient ring-shaped fortresses in Denmark in the 1930s, the find profoundly changed the way they thought about the Vikings that built them. Rather than mindless marauders, Vikings in the Middle Ages must have been a complex, technologically advanced people to build these fortifications. Now, Danish archaeologists have described a fifth ring fortress—the first such discovery in more than 60 years—revealing even more about these architecturally gifted warriors.

The new fortress, called Borgring, was found principally using an aerial, laser-based surveillance method called LIDAR, which returns an extremely high-resolution 3D ground map. It’s located on the Danish island Zealand, south of Copenhagen. The stronghold is a perfect circle with an outer diameter of 144 meters, and has four main gates crisscrossed by wood-paved roads. Read more.

Sombrero Galaxy M104 Credit: X-ray: NASA/UMass/Q.D.Wang et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI/AURA/Hubble Heritage; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. AZ/R.Kennicutt/SINGS Team

The Sombrero, also known as M104, is one of the largest galaxies in the nearby Virgo cluster, about 28 million light years from Earth. This Great Observatories view of the famous Sombrero galaxy was made using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope.

“My God, it’s full of stars” by Thomas Zimmer