15.1 Alpenglow lights up luminous plumes of icy spindrift blown from the peak of Mt. Everest in the pre-dawn twilight.

15.2 The shimmering lights of the Aurora Borealis have mesmerized people for generations. Here, intense curtains of light descend upon the shoreline of a frozen lake in northern Minnesota.

15.3 The soft pinks of the Belt of Venus gently blend into the serene blues of the earth’s shadow. Both make beautiful backdrops to a variety of scenes.

15.4 The glowing lights of bioluminescent algae add an unearthly dimension to landscape astrophotographs.

Source: Alex Cherney/ www.terrastro.com /The World At Night

15.5 The intense sky colors during blue hour provide the perfect backdrop to the warm colors of this capstone kiva in Utah’s desert southwest.

15.6 “As the Moon rose and the Sun set on October 8, a lunar eclipse was in progress seen from Chongqing, China. Trailing through this composite time exposure, the rising moon began as a dark reddened disk in total eclipse near the eastern horizon. Steadily climbing above the populous city’s colorful lights along the Yangtze River, the moon trail grows brighter and broader, until a bright Full Moon emerged from the earth’s shadow in evening skies.”—Yannan Zhou (photographer)

Source: Zhou Yannan/ www.flickr.com/photos/zhouyannan /The World At Night

15.7 The stars of Boötes and Ursa Major glow over this remote lake in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area and Wilderness (BWCAW).

15.8 The waxing crescent moon and a crescent Venus (lower right) set gracefully over the Cologne Cathedral in Germany.

Source: Bernd Pröschold/ www.sternstunden.net /The World At Night

15.9 The full moon rises over the Parthenon in Athens, Greece.

Source: Anthony Ayiomamitis / www.perseus.gr / The World At Night

15.10 The warm hues of the golden hour are a reliable time to make beautiful images, such as this classic scene of a surfer getting ready to catch some waves in the last light of the day in Southern California.

Source: Scott Freeman

15.11 Light painting is a good way to include a high-resolution foreground subject, light-painted at a low ISO setting, with a nightscape created at a much higher ISO.

15.12 The movement of the moon through the earth’s shadow during a lunar eclipse is seen clearly in this beautiful time-lapse image.

Source: Uli Fehr / www.fehrpics.com

15.13 Both the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are seen in this image of Mt. Kilimanjaro, as seen from Amboseli National Park, southern Kenya.

Source: Steed Jun Yu / NightChina.net / The World At Night

15.14 “You might say it’s a matter of luck to get nice Northern Lights and an amazing fireball. Well, it’s not quite true. When you shoot the Lights every clear night, chances increase by a good factor. So, as in many other fields, dedication gets your job done in night sky photography. During the three or four nights before the shot, I observed many bright meteors and I just felt this one coming.”—Alex Conu (photographer)

Source: Alex Conu / alexconu.com

15.15 The Milky Way galactic core sets behind ancient petroglyphs in California’s high desert.

Source: Grant Kaye / http://grantkaye.com

15.16 The mid-summer Milky Way arcs gracefully over campsites next to Florence Dome in California’s High Sierra. This panorama image is comprised of two rows of thirteen images, or twenty-six images in total.

15.17 “Night arrives in the remote Saharan Desert of Tassili National Park; a World Heritage Site in southern Algeria. While the Sahara man (Taureg people) prepares their traditional mint tea, stars of Scorpius rise from the east, the Centaurus shines in the southeast, and the Southern Cross barely rise above the cliffs in south. The view is made in adventure The World At Night (TWAN) trip to the heart of Sahara. Prehistoric skygazers surely witnessed a similar sky. Tassili region is noted for rock paintings and archaeological sites dating to neolithic times.”—Babak Tafreshi

Source: Babak Tafreshi/ www.dreamview.net / www.twanight.org /The World At Night

15.18 The Aurora Borealis arcs gracefully over one of Minnesota’s thousands of lakes in this panorama image, comprised of three rows of eight images, or twenty-four images in total.

15.19 A relatively rare, four-planet planetary conjunction (five if you include Earth!), clearly illustrates the flatness of the solar system.

15.20 A rocket launch is a stunning nightscape subject, as seen here for this Atlas 5 rocket launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Source: Ben Cooper / www.launchphotography.com

15.21 “The evolution of the 2006 March 29th’s total solar eclipse above Apollo’s temple in Side, Turkey.”—Cristina Ţintǎ (photographer)

Source: Cristina Ţintǎ/ www.flickr.com/photos/cristinatinta /The World At Night

15.22 Over three hours of star trails combine in this mesmerizing composite image made in northern Minnesota.

15.23 Dusk blends into complete darkness over Hovenweep National Monument in southern Utah.

15.24 “This image was made on the 1st of October 2008, on the summit of the volcanic island of Stromboli. I wasn’t expecting to make such an image, as time was very limited. You can’t climb the Stromboli volcano on your own these days, so it’s always a guided climb. But it turned out to be just at the right moment: shortly after sunset, already dark enough to see the Big Dipper, but not quite too dark to lose the foreground.”—Philippe Mollet (photographer)

Source: Philippe Mollet / The World At Night

15.25 The faint cone of zodiacal light reaches upwards from the horizon (left) to intersect the arc of the summer Milky Way (right) in this fisheye lens view created in a dark location just outside Sydney, Australia.