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Jupiter’s innermost large moon, Io, is extremely volcanic. “If you look closely on the upper left and upper right horizon, you can see eruptions in the process of happening,” says Benson. “We know that at least 400 volcanos are continuously blasting magma into space from Io.” Mosaic composite photograph. Galileo, July 3, 1999. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.

At the outset of both his new book, Planetfall, and his exhibition of the same title now at the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, photographer Michael Benson defines the word “planetfall.” Planetfall, he states, is “the act or an instance of sighting a planet after a space voyage.”

It is really the existence, in the last 50 years, of spacecraft orbiting the planets of our solar system that has necessitated the term. “Each of these far-flung machines is following the traditions blazed by the great Earthbound explorers, but when its destination comes into view, we can no longer call that dramatic moment ‘landfall,’” according to the exhibition. “Hence ‘planetfall’—the moment of arrival at other worlds.”

In his latest series of images, Benson attempts to lift us off terra firma and bring this awe-inspiring moment to us. His 40 large-scale photographs, hanging in the AAAS Art Gallery, are remarkably crisp views of the rings of Saturn, moons in transit, a sunset on Mars and volcanic eruptions on Jupiter’s moon, Io, among other marvels. Each image is in “true color,” as Benson puts it.

To make his photographs, Benson starts by perusing through thousands of raw image data collected on missions led by NASA—Cassini, Galileo, MESSENGER, Viking and Voyager, among others—and the European Space Agency. He has compared this process to panning for gold—the precious gold nuggets being beautiful sequences of images, rarely seen by the public, that he can piece together into one seamless photograph. It can take anywhere from tens to hundreds of raw frames to arrange, like a mosaic, one legible composite image. Then rendering the photograph in realistic colors adds another layer of complexity. Benson describes the process in his book:

“In order for a full-color image to be created, the spacecraft needs to have taken at minimum two, but preferably three, individual photographs of a given subject, with each exposed through a different filter…. Ideally, those filters are red, green, and blue, in which case a composite image color image can usually be created without too much trouble…. If a red and a blue filtered shot are available but not a green, for example, a synthetic green image can be created by mixing the other two colors.”

Uranus and its rings. Mosaic composite photograph. Voyager, January 24, 1986. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.

Some of the colors are quite striking. Jupiter’s moon, Io, is a brilliant yellow, in one of Benson’s photographs (shown at top). To me, it looks like a shiny bowling ball, whereas for Benson it calls to mind the yellow rim of Morning Glory Pool in Yellowstone National Park. “It’s all sulphur,” he says. Then, there is the photographer’s very modernist-looking portrait of Uranus (above) and its rings in a stunning robin’s egg blue, assembled from raw images taken by the Voyager spacecraft as it flew by the planet on January 24, 1986. Uranus’ rotation axis is roughly parallel to the plane of the solar system, making its rings vertical in this view. ”This is about as close, I believe, to what the human eye would see as it is possible to produce using existing data,” Benson explains.

The sights take some time to digest. At a recent preview of the AAAS exhibition, I watched as onlookers approached the photographs, oriented themselves with their subjects and tried to make sense of the shadows, streaks and gouges they saw. As TIME reported on its blog, LightBox, “Benson’s visions demand more than a single look; the longer one spends with his vast landscapes, considering the scale and scope, the more they facilitate a state of meditation.”

Meditate on these selections from Planetfall, on display at the AAAS Art Gallery through June 28, 2013.

Saturn with Mimas. Mimas, one of Saturn’s moons, as seen against the shadows cast by the planet’s rings onto its northern hemisphere. Cassini, November 7, 2004. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.

Saturn, Mimas and Tethys. Mosaic composite photograph. Cassini, July 16, 2005. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.

Sun on the Pacific. The view seen from the International Space Station at an altitude of 235 miles. ISS 007 crew, July 21, 2003. Credit: NASA JSC/ISS 07 crew/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.

Transit of Io. The volcanic moon passes across the face of Jupiter. Mosaic composite photograph. Cassini, January 1, 2001. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.

Eclipse of Sun by Earth. Ultraviolet exposure, Solar Dynamics Observatory, Apri 2, 2011. Credit: NASA GSFC/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.

Surface of Jupiter’s Moon Europa. Galileo, June 27, 1996. Credit: NASA/JPL/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.

Crescent Neptune and its largest satellite, Triton. Mosaic composite photograph. Voyager 2, August 31, 1989. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.

Enceladus Vents Into Space. Saturn’s moon Enceladus geysers water into space from its south polar region. Mosaic composite photograph. Cassini, December 25, 2009. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.

Artist’s rendition of a ethane lake on Titan. Image via NASA/Karl Kofoed

Science conferences are hotbeds for jargon. In fields where dissertation titles tend to have a string of polysyllabic words, followed by the requisite colon, followed by another string of polysyllabic words; where abstracts of scholarly articles are packed with the names of chemical compounds, isotope ratios and undefined program acronyms; where images are multivariate graphs of curves traced through dots crisscrossed with error bars, the instances where an outside person can read a summary of science written for scientists by scientists are naturally rare. And why not go whole hog with the language of your peers when you’re at a conference sharing work with your peers?

But several summaries of scientific presentations given at this year’s 44th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC), currently being held in The Woodlands, Texas, are not only easy to follow—they are beautiful. They cut through layers of complexity to strike at the very heart of the topics at hand. That’s because they are written in haiku format.

Haiku, a terse form of Japanese poetry, have three lines. The first can only be five syllables long. The second can bleed a little longer to seven syllables. The last returns to five syllables. For the past decade or so, some creative LPSC attendees have been submitting haiku as summaries for their talks or poster sessions. These haiku fulfill a conference requirement, that in addition to traditional abstracts which are about two pages long and can be full of acronyms and chemical formulas, attendees who want to present their work must also submit a one- or two-sentence teaser to be printed in the meeting’s programs along with their presentation’s title.

This teaser, akin to a tweet, already forces scientists to be their pithiest. But a haiku lets them do this with style, grace and at times levity.

Thirty-two haikus were printed in the program this year. Below are a few of our favorites:

1) The Transcendence of Benzene on Titan

Ethane and methane are gases on Earth—the former is a derivative of natural gas, and the latter is the main component of natural gas itself. On Saturn’s moon Titan, temperatures average a mere 94 Kelvin (roughly -290 degrees Fahrenheit), forcing these compounds into a liquid state. In fact, they are Titan’s analogues to water—in 2004, the Cassini-Huygens space probe discovered ethane and methane carve rivers and pool in lakes. Also on the surface of Titan are small amounts of benzene, a sweet-smelling petrochemical that is composed of six carbon atoms joined in a ring, each attached to one hydrogen atom. Though a liquid on Earth, benzene on Titan condenses into waxy, ice-like chunks.

In a talk today entitled, “Laboratory Investigation of Benzene Dissolving in a Titan Lake,” Michael Malaska of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory describes how he and co-investigator Robert Hodyss froze benzene and dropped it into liquid ethane encased within an experimental apparatus they affectionately dubbed the “FrankenBeaker,” a device that ensures that samples keep their chill conditions. They found that the liquid ethane eats away at the benzene solids, leading them to suppose that much like how Earth has limestone caves, ethane pools could etch cavities within benzene shores of Titan’s lakes.

Their summary is our favorite:

Tiny little rings
Drifting in a Titan lake
Fade away slowly.

Through this, the benzene on Titan has an almost ephemeral quality, underscored by the fleeting meter of the haiku. And the idea that something tangible exists but decays over time mirrors our world: people are born and then die, civilizations rise and fall, the mightiest mountains will crumble into dust, our planet will get consumed by the eventual explosion of the Sun. But it is the juxtaposition of the small and the large—the “tiny” and the “Titan”—that is so compelling. Are we not all tiny molecules floating in the vastness of space and time, floating until we eventually fade from existence?

The “FrankenBeaker” keeps Malaska’s and Hodyss’s samples ultra cold. Image via Malaska & Hodyss/LPSC

“Using a haiku for the short program description seemed like a fun challenge to fit an idea into such a short medium. It really makes you distill the idea down to it’s essentials,” Malaska explains over email. He admits that his abstract is “pretty intense and detailed,” but that writing a haiku—his first for LPSC—seemed like a fun idea. “I don’t normally write haikus or poetry. But I did come up with a Titan rap at one point: ‘Dunes of plastic/it’s fantastic/gettin’ all sticky/and electrostatic.’”

“One of my nieces used to play the ‘three word game’ with me,” he adds. “You can only speak in sentences of three words. This really forces you to think about what is essential. It is interesting what (and how) you can convey complex thoughts and concepts into just the essentials. It’s a great tool to help write concise sentences and presentations.”

2) The fated paths of Phobos and Diemos

Phobos and Diemos, the two moons of Mars, trace paths in Martian sky, at times going between the Curiosity rover and the Sun. Images of the moons traveling across the Sun’s face, snapped by Curiosity, allowed Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University and his colleagues from around the country to analyze in detail the exact tracks of these orbits and how the paths evolve through time. For example, Phobos’s trajectory is slowed by it’s attraction to Mars, causing its orbit to decay. Their poster, which will be presented on Thursday, is titled, “Astrometric Observations of Phobos and Deimos During Solar Transits Imaged by the Curiosity Mastcam.” Their haiku is strikingly mysterious:

Phobos and Deimos, seen here together for comparison. Image via NASA

Two moons in the sky
wandering by the Sun’s face
their orbits constrained.

The two moons wander, but not aimlessly—their paths are fated. Taken outside of the context of science, I can’t help but think that the poem is bestowing some enigmatic wisdom about the interaction of couples in a relationship. Seek sunshine but don’t get too close to it? Or, if the two of you are fettered to a certain path, bright times are only something you see in passing?

“I was considering the absurdity of writing a summary of an abstract of a paper/talk/poster. It occurred to me to be creative in response to absurdity,” Lemmon writes in an email. He adds, “the haiku reinforced the concept that the subject was nature, not data, and in this case that juxtaposition was key.”

He continues, “I think any form that constrains the expression of an idea helps that expression, at least if it is allowed at all. To describe your poster in one word is not useful. But this allows you to focus on the ideas that should get people to look at the longer-form expression. A dry statement (like the title) can be short and will inform. A second dry statement adds little. Trying to measure up to the standards of an art form, I hope, at least amused some and maybe created interest in what is in the poster (which is quite non-poetic, sadly).”

3) Mistaken identity

Emma Bullock, of Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, along with colleagues from the University of Tennessee gives our next haiku, which is sure to bring a smile to your face:

Oh, “megachondrule”
We were sadly mistaken 
You are impact melt.

In her poster, “Allende 10 B 41: Megachondrule, or Impact Melt Clast?” presented today, Bullock reports on the examination of a slice of the Allende meteorite, a carbonaceous chondrite that fell to Earth in 1969 over Mexico. Chondrites are thought to represent ancient material from a planetesimal or other body that never had a chance to separate into a crust, mantle and core. Other researchers had previously examined a large rounded object in the slice of meteor: the object, about 1.6 centimeters in diameter, was thought to be a megachondrule–a relatively big nugget of once-molten material that many point to being one of the earliest solids to form in our solar system. Exciting stuff! But alas, it wasn’t meant to be.

“The short abstract is just designed to encourage people to come to your presentation,” Bullock writes in an email. “So why not have fun with it? I have a few other friends who also took up the challenge, and its been fun trying to find the other haiku.”

4) The secrets of old spacecraft

Long-time LPSC haiku veteran Ralph Lorenz writes in an email,”Composition mirrors the scientific process—although acquiring new information at first makes things complicated, the ultimate goal is to find a simple set of rules or processes that explains all that we see. A haiku is a bit like that, a minimalist description.”

Lorentz, from the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and his co-author examined data from seismometers that bounced onto Mars as part of the Viking landers, launched in the mid 1970s. They weren’t searching for earthquakes—instead they sought to see if dust devils whirling over the sensor could possibly be seen in its data or if more run-of the-mill wind gusts obscured dust-devils’ signatures. The haiku, a summary of their poster “Viking Seismometer Record: Data Restoration and Dust Devil Sea,” presented today, speaks for itself:

Whispers from the past
Viking mostly felt the wind
Let’s all look closer.

Other favorites include “Impact shock heats Mars / Core can’t convect, dynamo dies / Back in a billion?”, for a poster presented by Jafar Arkani-Hamed of the University of Toronto, and “Rocks rain from above / Many ready at the reins / New methods reign too,” for a poster presented by Marc Fries (of Galactic Analytics LLC and the Planetary Science Institute) on the detection of meteorite impacts by weather radars and seismometers. Incidentally, when asked what he thought about writing haiku, Fries replied:

Ah, distill a work
Drop by drop to syllables
To freshen the mind.

Jesper Kongshaug’s Northern Lights display at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Photo by Margot Schulman.

The aurora borealis, also known as the Northern Lights, is a spectacle to behold—so much so, that it is hard to put into words. I think Smithsonian‘s former senior science editor, Laura Helmuth, did it justice a few years back. “Try to imagine the most colorful, textured sunset you’ve ever seen, then send it swirling and pulsing across an otherwise clear and starry sky,” she wrote.

Helmuth also handily described the physics behind the natural phenomenon:

“Your planet is being buffeted by solar wind—particles of protons and electrons that the sun spews into space. Some of the charged particles get sucked into the earth’s magnetic field and flow toward the pole until they collide with our atmosphere. Then, voilà: the aurora borealis (or aurora australis, if you happen to be at the bottom of the Southern Hemisphere.)”

Of course, the experience of viewing the Northern Lights, particularly for residents of the contiguous United States, is a rare but privileged one. (Smithsonian actually includes the aurora borealis on its “Life List” of places to go and things to do and see before you die.) Places above 60 degrees latitude—Alaska, Canada’s Yukon, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, for instance—are prime spots for seeing the lights show, usually around the fall and spring equinoxes.  But, occasionally, it can be seen farther south. I witnessed it once in Vermont. The sight was intoxicating.

Aurora borealis over Lyngen, Norway. Courtesy of Flickr user Tor Even Mathisen.

It is really no wonder, then, that artists find inspiration in the Northern Lights.

Danish lighting designer Jesper Kongshaug saw the aurora borealis several times in 2012, while he was working on stage lighting for a run of “Hamlet” at the Halogaland Theatre in Tromsø, Norway. He also talked with locals there about their encounters with it. So, when the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. commissioned an installation from him mimicking the Northern Lights, Kongshaug had these experiences and conversations to inform him. He planned for about 11 months, collaborating with the Baltimore-based company Image Engineering, and his “Northern Lights” debuted on February 20, 2012, in conjunction with Nordic Cool 2013, a month-long festival celebrating the cultures of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Greenland. Each night from 5:30 to 11 p.m., until the festival’s end on March 17, a total of 10 lasers positioned around the Kennedy Center project the green and blue streamers of the aurora borealis onto all four sides of the building’s white marble facade.

Inspired by Kongshaug’s installation, I did some exploring and found some other fascinating Northern Lights-inspired projects:

Music

Paul Moravec, a composer and Pulitzer Prize winner in music, released a new album this past December, “Northern Lights Electric,” with four songs performed by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. “My own music often seems to involve some physical, tangible catalyst,” says Moravec on the liner notes. The album’s title song is his attempt to capture, in music, the Northern Lights, which the composer witnessed once in New Hampshire. “The 12-minute piece begins with tinkling percussion, billowing strings and a searching motive in the woodwinds. Then brass suddenly shoots up like a spray of multi-colored lights. Spacious, Coplandesque chords depict the immense night sky,” wrote Tom Huizenga on NPR’s classical music blog, Deceptive Cadence. Listen to part of the composition, here.

Food

Johan Lans prefers to be called “food creator” or “designer for new dishes” as opposed to head chef at Camp Ripan, a hotel, conference center and restaurant, in Kiruna, Sweden. A native of the northernmost city in Sweden, Lans is very familiar with the Northern Lights. In fact, he has designed an entire dinner menu with tastes, smells, sounds, colors and shapes that he believes conjure up the phenomenon. Bright vegetables and local fish ornately plated, an entree of hare and concoctions like “cucumber snow”—skip to 4:25 in this TEDxTalk, to watch Lans describe these and other the dishes.

Architecture

Cathedral of the Northern Lights. Photo courtesy of Schmidt Hammer Lassen.

Completed just this year, the Cathedral of the Northern Lights in Alta, Norway, is a landmark built to honor—and complement—the aurora borealis, commonly seen in the town located 310 miles north of the Arctic Circle. “The contours of the church rise as a spiralling shape to the tip of the belfry 47 metres [154 feet] above the ground,” the architectural firm Schmidt Hammer Lassen explains on its Web site. “The facade, clad in titanium, reflects the northern lights during the long periods of Arctic winter darkness and emphasizes the experience of the phenomenon.” Check out these images.

Fashion

At this year’s London Fashion Week, from February 15-19, English designer Matthew Williamson unveiled his Autumn/Winter 2013 collection of knit sweaters, pleated skirts and sequin dresses. “It was inspired by the idea of an English Rose, that kind of quintessentially British girl, and I wanted her to take a journey to the Northern Lights, where I saw these toxic colors and amazing neon skies,” Williamson told Reuters. See some of his designs in this video.

The Milky Way Galaxy Exploding from Mount Rainier. Photo by David Morrow (Everett, Washington). Photographed at Sunrise Point in Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, October 6, 2012.

David Morrow, a 27-year-old aerospace engineer by day and budding photographer by night, was perched at Sunrise Point on the evening of October 6, 2012. From the popular viewing spot in Mount Rainier National Park, he had a clear view of Rainier, the 14,411-foot beastly stratovolcano to his west. As he recalls, at about 9 p.m. the sun had set and the stars began to appear. Filling the viewfinder of his Nikon D800, quite brilliantly, was the Milky Way.

“It is not often that you see the Milky Way line up so perfectly with an earthly object,” said Morrow, when his resulting photograph (shown above) was selected as a finalist in Smithsonian.com’s 2012 photo contest. “The stars almost looked as though they were erupting from the mountain and I knew this was a moment in time that I had to capture.”

For a decade now, Smithsonian magazine’s annual photo contest has been a loving ode to these moments. Each year, photographers from around the world submit entries in five categories near and dear to us: the Natural World, Travel, People, Americana and Altered Images. Our photo editors, who have reviewed more than 290,000 photographs from upwards of 90 countries in the contest’s history, then select 10 finalists in each category.

This week, Smithsonian.com announced the finalists for the 2012 photo contest. At this point, the public is invited to vote on a readers’ choice winner, and, ultimately, our editors will select category winners and a grand prize winner, to be revealed later this spring. We here at Collage of Arts and Sciences have a special affinity for the Natural World images, which beautifully capture animals, plants and landscapes; geological or climatological features; and scientific processes and endeavors.

So what makes a finalist stand out from other entries?

“Quite simply, I look for something that I have not seen before,” says Maria G. Keehan, Smithsonian magazine’s art director. For the Natural World submissions, she and her colleagues sifted through a fair share of photographs of pets, rainbows, mating insects and horses in misty light (“Misty anything has kind of taken its toll on me,” says Keehan) to parse out images that accomplish something truly unique—like capturing an unusual or rare animal behavior. “Of course good technique and composition are always part of the judging structure, but originality is what strikes me. I really look for things that make you gasp or question,” she adds. “Not just, ‘Oooo, beautiful bird,’ but ‘Wow. Look at the perspective on that. They shot the image through the bird’s wings!”

To make the cut, a photograph has to evoke a visceral reaction. Future contestants, take note. Keehan’s advice is this: “Trust your (natural!) instincts about what is peculiar, remarkable or sublime.”

Without further ado, here are the remainder of the 10th annual photo contest’s Natural World finalists:

Baby Owl in Studio. Photo by Phillip Pilkington (Southport, UK). Photographed in Southport, UK, November 2012.

Phillip Pilkington snapped a portrait of a fluffy, four-week-old Tawny owl (above) at a bird enthusiast’s home in Southport, UK. “I was aiming to do a traditional studio portrait of an unusual studio subject,” he says. The owl was still, and so it made for an ideal sitter, the photographer recalls. “I just concentrated on the photography,” Pilkington adds. “I wanted to do a close-up shot, [but] at the same time I didn’t want to get too close, and that is why I chose to crop the image.”

Visiting the Bronx Zoo. Photo by Vanessa Bartlett (New York, New York). October 2012, Bronx Zoo, New York City.

When Vanessa Bartlett took up photography last year, she needed, in her words, a “subject that wouldn’t shatter my fragile photography ego.” So, she went to the Bronx Zoo. On an October day, she photographed baboons, giraffes and lions, but it was a gorilla that stole her attention. “They’re majestic,” says Bartlett, of the primates. “But the expression he gave was what made me take the photo.”

Bartlett sat with the gorilla for about 30 minutes, just a pane of glass separating them. “Just as a photographer likes a look a model gives in the middle of a shoot, I saw a look I loved from the gorilla,” she says. “What I caught was a personal, private moment. That’s what’s so captivating.”

An Onlooker Witnesses the Annular Solar Eclipse as the Sun Sets on May 20, 2012. Photo by Colleen Pinski (Peyton, CO). Photographed in Albuquerque, NM, May 2012.

On May 20, 2012, Americans, especially on the west coast, were privy to an annular solar eclipse—where the moon blocks all but the outer ring of the sun. “My husband and I heard about the eclipse a few days before it happened,” says Colleen Pinski, who captured the image, above. “So, I was compelled to take some photos of it…I couldn’t miss the ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity to shoot it.”

Antheraea Polyphemus Caterpillar Striking a Rather Devious-Looking Pose. Photo by Colin Hutton (Durham, North Carolina). Photographed in Duke Forest, North Carolina, September 2011.

Colin Hutton was in the Duke Forest, a 7,060-acre tract of land in North Carolina used for research, when he took this remarkable close-up of a caterpillar of a North American moth (Antheraea polyphemus). He was actually searching for jumping spiders, but this little guy was a welcome diversion. “I really like the glowing quality of the caterpillar’s skin and the devious look of its defensive posture,” says Hutton. “It reminds me of the character Mr. Burns from The Simpsons as he says ‘Excellent…’ while tapping his fingers together.”

Mummy, I Am Down Here, and Hungry! Photo by Bjorn Olesen (Singapore). Photographed in Sarawak, Borneo, Malaysia, November, 2010.

Bjorn Olesen was on a week-long trip to Sarawak, Borneo, in November 2010, when he photographed this juvenile Spectacled Spiderhunter (Arachnothera flavigaster) calling out to its parents. “In my view the photo demonstrates the great strength of still photography: to freeze those magic moments that may have otherwise been unnoticed,” says Olesen. “The soft light, the inspiring pose, the color of the bird goes very well together with the beautiful palette of greens of the ferns.”

Breeding Penguins. Photo by Neal Piper (Washington, DC). Photographed at Damoy Point, Antarctica, January 2012.

Neal Piper spent 12 days in Antarctica in February 2012. “I have always been fascinated with penguins and dreamed of visiting Antarctica to see them in their natural habitat,” he says. To get to Damoy Point, where he took this photograph, Piper traveled three days by ship through the Drake Passage and then took a short jaunt on a small motorized raft to his campsite, where he would study a breeding colony of Gentoo penguins.

“Although it was a bitter cold evening, I woke up to a beautiful sunrise. The snow was glimmering upon the majestic mountains,” says Piper.  ”I looked over at the colony of Gentoo penguins and saw a few of them overlooking the cliff, almost as if they were enjoying the view. I grabbed my camera and watched them for about an hour until one of the adults and newborn chicks looked into the horizon. I knew right then I had the shot. After taking the photo I looked down at the viewfinder and instantly smiled.”

According to Piper, Gentoo penguins have funny personalities. “After studying them for a week, I discovered that they are very loving and protective to their newborn chicks. To build their nests, they pick up rocks with their beaks, usually stolen from another penguin nest, and place them on their nest. Once the perpetrator places the rock on its nest, the victim often reclaims it and places it back on its own nest.  It was a very entertaining scene,” he says.

A Man-Made Ice Geyser. Photo by Nathan Carlsen (Duluth, Minnesota). Photographed in Duluth, Minnesota, January 2012.

“A water pipe in Duluth is ‘bled’ every year to ensure it doesn’t freeze,” says Nathan Carlsen, the photographer who captured the finalist, above. “As the water freezes, it builds this amazing ice geyser.” As an experiment, the Minnesotan dangled a rope of LED lights down the geyser. “I knew it would light up well as it is perfectly clear ice, but I had know idea how beautiful it would be. Every year the formation looks a bit different and I go out to it to take a few more [photos]. But this one, the first one, still proves to be my best shot so far.”

Ants Holding Seeds. Photo by Eko Adiyanto (Bekasi, Indonesia). Photographed in Bekasi, West Java, Indonesia, April 2012.

Eko Adiyanto stumbled across this scene of ants fiercely gripping seeds in Bekasi, West Java, Indonesia, last April. He felt compelled to take the photograph, above, because it seemed like a super-ant feat of strength. “They are small but very powerful,” says Adiyanto. [Correction, March 13, 2013: As entomologist and Scientific American blogger Alex Wild addressed recently, Adiyanto did not stumble across this scene. In an email, the photographer has explained that he gave the seeds to the ants to bite and then lifted, placed and stacked the ants on the branch himself. Once the ants were in these positions, he took the photograph.]

A Pair of Bald Eagles Share a Meal. Photo by Don Holland (Dyer, Tennessee). Photographed in Reelfoot Lake State Park, Tennessee, January 2012.

Don Holland enjoys photographing birds in flight, particularly great egrets and bald eagles. He was driving a stretch of road in Reelfoot Lake State Park in northwest Tennessee when his wife spotted a pair of bald eagles in a dead tree nearby. “I stopped the car immediately and began photographing the eagle pair eating what appeared to be the remains of a coot. Since most of the food was gone, I realized I didn’t have time to mount the lens on the tripod to capture the action. I handheld the camera and lens for the sequence of photos I took in the short time before the eagles flew,” recalls Holland. “The sky was bright-cloudy, and the sun was beginning to peek through the clouds at 20-30 degrees over my right shoulder. With evenly dispersed and adequate light, I worked quickly to take advantage of the special opportunity of capturing the behavior of the eagle pair in an uncluttered background.”

See the finalists in the other four categories, and vote for the 10th Annual Photo Contest Readers’ Choice Award by 2PM EST on March 29.