Inside the Palace

China’s Lunar Palace 1 research facility is designed to test life-support systems that will be needed to realize the country’s goal of establishing a base on the Moon. This month, volunteers started a series of experiments for which they will be sealed into the site in Beijing for weeks at a time. Credit: Ju Huanzong/Xinhua via ZUMA Wire

Art ants

Jupiter enhanced

A passing lake

Lake Mackay in Western Australia comes and goes with the rain. Brown hills poke through the surface of the ephemeral lake in this image, shot by the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-2B satellite as scientists continue to calibrate its instruments after its March launch. Credit: Copernicus Sentinel data (2017)/ESA (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)

Galactic spiral

Multiple Milky Ways are seen in this image from photographer Christian Sasse, who took pictures of the night sky from Australia every 60 minutes and superimposed them. Credit: SassePhoto

Gaia’s vision

This psychedelic egg is a representation of how the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite has scanned the sky since it started operating in 2014. Released last month, the image appears dark blue where Gaia has frequently scanned a region, and paler colours where its gaze has fallen less often, as it maps the brightness and position of more than one billion stars. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC

Preserved protection

The Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Canada, released pictures this month of “the best preserved armoured dinosaur ever found”. The remarkable 112-million-year-old fossil of a nodosaur was uncovered by miners in Alberta’s tar sands in 2011. Credit: Royal Tyrrell Museum

Head start

Wax effigies of eighteenth-century British naval leader Horatio Nelson and prime minister William Pitt the Elder were taken from their home at Westminster Abbey this month to be examined at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. The hospital’s radiology department is CT scanning the heads to help conservators determine their composition and structure. Credit: Jack Taylor/Getty

Support structure

Artist Lorenzo Quinn’s sculpture of two hands emerging from a Venice canal calls attention to the climate change that threatens this famous Italian city. Entitled Support, it is on show as part of the Venice Biennale until November. Credit: Zsolt Czegledi/EPA/REX/Shutterstock

The view from above