The Sleeping Gypsy is an 1897 oil-on-canvas by the French Naïve artist Henri Rousseau. It is a fantastical depiction of a lion musing over a sleeping woman on a moonlit night. Rousseau first exhibited the painting at the 13th Salon des Indépendants, and tried unsuccessfully to sell it to the mayor of his hometown, Laval. It instead entered the private collection of a Parisian charcoal merchant, where it remained until 1924, when it was discovered by the art critic Louis Vauxcelles. The Paris-based art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler purchased the painting in 1924, although a controversy arose over whether the painting was a forgery. It was acquired by art historian Alfred H. Barr Jr. for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it remains.

Painting credit: Henri Rousseau

The Vermont State House, located in Montpelier, is the state capitol of the U.S. state of Vermont and the seat of the Vermont General Assembly. The current Greek Revival structure is the third building on the same site to be used as the State House. Designed by Thomas Silloway in 1857 and 1858, it was occupied in 1859. This photograph of the Vermont State House was taken in October 2021.

Photograph credit: Tony Jin

SpaceX CRS-8 was a Commercial Resupply Services mission to the International Space Station that launched on April 8, 2016, at 20:43 UTC. It was the twenty-third flight of a Falcon 9 rocket, the tenth flight of a Dragon cargo spacecraft, and the eighth operational mission contracted to SpaceX by NASA under the Commercial Resupply Services program. After boosting the payload on its orbital trajectory, the rocket's first stage re-entered the denser layers of the atmosphere and landed vertically on the ocean landing platform Of Course I Still Love You nine minutes after liftoff (as pictured in this photograph), thus achieving a long-sought-after milestone in the SpaceX reusable launch system development program.

Photograph credit: SpaceX

Ilan Ramon (June 20, 1954 – February 1, 2003) was an Israeli fighter pilot and later the first Israeli astronaut. Ramon was a Space Shuttle payload specialist on STS-107, the final mission of Space Shuttle Columbia, in which he and the six other crew members were killed when the spacecraft disintegrated during re-entry. At the age of 48, he was the oldest member of the crew. Ramon is the only foreign recipient of the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, which he was awarded posthumously by the United States Congress. This official NASA portrait of Ramon, wearing an Advanced Crew Escape Suit, was taken in 2001.

Photograph credit: NASA

The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster was the first fatal accident to an American spacecraft in flight. On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into the flight of STS-51-L, the 25th mission of NASA's Space Shuttle program. All seven crew members aboard were killed. The spacecraft disintegrated 46,000 feet (14 km) above the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 11:39 am EST. This official portrait of the STS-51-L crew was taken on November 15, 1985. In the back row, from left to right, are Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, and Judith Resnik. In the front row, from left to right, are Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, and Ronald McNair.

Photograph credit: NASA

Jacek Malczewski (15 July 1854 – 8 October 1929) was a Polish Symbolist painter. One of the most revered painters of Poland, he was associated with the patriotic Young Poland movement following a century of partitions. Malczewski is regarded as the father of Polish symbolism, and his creative output combined the predominant style of his times with historical motifs of Polish martyrdom, the romantic ideals of independence, Christian and Greek mythology, folk tales, as well as his love of the natural world. Many of Malczewski's paintings prominently feature self-portraits in elaborate costume, including this 1914 oil-on-canvas painting, titled Self-Portrait in White Dress, which depicts him wearing a white traditional 19th-century artist's smock-frock, a white neckerchief (a common garment for European men in the 18th and 19th century), and a wide white beret. The portrait is in the collection of the National Museum in Kraków.

Painting credit: Jacek Malczewski

The pomegranate (Punica granatum) is a fruit-bearing deciduous shrub in the family Lythraceae, subfamily Punicoideae, that grows between 5 and 10 m (16 and 33 ft) tall. The pomegranate was originally found only throughout the Mediterranean region. It was introduced into Spanish America in the late 16th century and into California by Spanish settlers in 1769.

Photograph credit Ivar Leidus

Raising a Flag over the Reichstag (Russian: Знамя Победы над Рейхстагом, romanized: Znamya Pobedy nad Reykhstagom, lit. 'Victory Banner over the Reichstag') is an iconic World War II photograph, taken during the Battle of Berlin on 2 May 1945 by Yevgeny Khaldei. The photograph was reprinted in thousands of publications and came to be regarded around the world as one of the most significant and recognizable images of World War II, but, owing to the secrecy of Soviet media, both the identity of photographer and the identities of the men in the picture were often disputed.

The Reichstag was seen as symbolic of, and at the heart of, Nazi Germany. It was arguably the most symbolic target in Berlin. After its capture on 2 May 1945, Khaldei scaled the now pacified Reichstag to take a picture. He was carrying with him a large flag, sewn from three tablecloths for this very purpose, by his uncle. The official story would later be that two hand-picked soldiers, Meliton Kantaria (Georgian) and Mikhail Yegorov (Russian), raised the Soviet flag over the Reichstag, However, according to Khaldei himself, when he arrived at the Reichstag, he simply asked the soldiers who happened to be passing by to help with the staging of the photoshoot; the one who was attaching the flag was 18-year-old Private Kovalev from Burlin, Kazakhstan, the two others were Abdulkhakim Ismailov from Dagestan and Leonid Gorychev (also mentioned as Aleksei Goryachev) from Minsk.

Photograph credit: Yevgeny Khaldei for TASS; restored by Adam Cuerden

Artemis I was an uncrewed Moon-orbiting mission that was launched on November 16, 2022. It was the first major spaceflight of NASA's Artemis program and marked the agency's return to lunar exploration since the Apollo program after five decades. It was the first flight test of the Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, and the mission's main objective was to test the Orion spacecraft in preparation for future Artemis missions. Artemis I was launched from Launch Complex 39B at the Kennedy Space Center. After reaching orbit, the upper stage separated and performed a trans-lunar injection before releasing Orion and ten CubeSat satellites. Orion completed one flyby of the Moon on November 21 and completed a second flyby on December 5. This picture shows Artemis I launching from Launch Complex 39B.

Photograph credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

Great Yarmouth Town Hall is a municipal building on Hall Plain in Great Yarmouth, in Norfolk, England. It is the meeting place of Great Yarmouth Borough Council and is a Grade II* listed building. The town hall was designed by John Bond Pearce in the Queen Anne Revival style, with terracotta facings and a 110-foot-tall (34-metre) clock tower with a lantern above. It was opened by Edward, Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII), on 31 May 1882. The building served as the headquarters of Great Yarmouth County Borough Council for much of the 20th century and has continued to operate as the local seat of government following the formation of the enlarged borough council in 1974. This hand-colored photochrom shows Great Yarmouth Town Hall in the 1890s, seen from opposite the River Yare.

Photograph credit: Detroit Publishing Company; restored by Adam Cuerden

Kitt Peak National Observatory is a United States astronomical observatory located on Kitt Peak in the Quinlan Mountains, 55 miles (88 km) southwest of Tucson, Arizona, in the Sonoran Desert and the Tohono Oʼodham Nation. With more than twenty optical telescopes and two radio telescopes, it is one of the largest gatherings of astronomical instruments in the Northern Hemisphere. The observatory was founded in 1958, and was administered by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory from the early 1980s until 2019, after which it has been overseen by NOIRLab. This photograph, titled A Breeze of Color, shows a portion of Kitt Peak National Observatory at sunset, and was taken as part of a 2022 photographic expedition to all the NOIRLab sites.

Photograph credit: Tomáš Slovinský