You’ve heard it before, that a picture can be worth a thousand words, and in some cases, it really is true. We’ve all seen pictures from various fields of science that just makes you stop for a second and wonder how nature has been able to create these scenes and objects, and how incredibly talented photographers (or whoever made it look so good) have been able to capture them. This post is just a short list of galleries and image sites I’ve recently come across, that made me go WOW!

Well pictures are basically just snapshots of light in a scene at a given moment, so why not start the list with a collection of the 20 Most Incredible Light Phenomena? This list really is incredible, and it’ll show you some of the most daunting visual experiences that you can have from the surface of Earth, most of them actually visible to the naked eye under the right circumstances. I’ll save you the whole 1000 words and let you see for yourself.

The next gallery is going above the surface of the Earth, looking down at it. While not as visually pleasing, the pictures in this collection of the 10 Greatest Major-Impact Craters on Earth (actually from the same cool picture site, www.environmentalgraffiti.com) really tell their story, and with the accompanying text, you can actually learn some things. As an added bonus, you get to see the traces from some of the most important events in the history of the Planet.

Moving on to the field of biology, National Geographic presents a small sample of Colorful Sea Creatures that makes you and me look quite boring if you ask me. I’ve always been fascinated by the diversity of sea animals, and the more we investigate of the deep oceans, the more strange species we’ll definitely come across.

Last, but definitely not least, I want to mention a special site that has been made available. If you’ve been looking at astronomical pictures, you’ve most certainly come about pictures from the NASA archive, who have been producing an amazing amount of pictures from ground and space-based telescopes as well as satellites, probes and rovers all around the Solar System. So whats new? Well NASA has in collaboration with Internet Archive created a new dedicated media site, that holds the largest amount of NASA images to date, and promises to add a lot more so we can all be amazed by space, and the incredible amount of work behind the pictures. Believe me, I’ve tried reducing the data from telescopes in order to get just a vaguely decent picture, and it’s everything but easy.
The new site is located at www.nasaimages.org, and will also include sound and video footage. If you’re more interested, go read the press release.

This marks the end of my short list, but there are an uncountable number of amazing galleries out there, so if you have some favorites that are not on the list, please share them with us in the comments below.