To make an interesting picture, be in front of something interesting. That’s exactly what researcher Fredrik Jutfelt did when capturing this graceful and mysterious moment of a clownfish nestled into its sea anemone on the Great Barrier Reef. Having access to remote locations allows researchers to witness and document special moments like these.

The team exploring the innovative use of optical fibers to monitor events like landslides and volcanic eruptions often worked in rugged and remote parts of the world. But it wasn’t until Wojciech Gajek provided this picture of a team member carrying loops of fiber along a ridge in the Swiss Alps that we had a photo conveying the research’s spectacular setting.

Many images we see of cape buffalo show them on bright, sunny days walking through grassland or becoming prey of the many predators in sub-Saharan Africa. The use of a camera trap with a flash at night here allows a different view of these creatures, illuminating the texture of their horns and allowing the deep blue of the night to become a strong backdrop.

Luisa Dorr expertly captured a group of women who were “firsts,” including Patricia Bath, seen here, who was the first to perform laserphaco cataract surgery and the first female African American doctor to receive a medical patent. Other scientific women among the Firsts project include oceanographer Sylvia Earle; the first female president of the Salk Institute, Elizabeth Blackburn; and the first woman to walk in space, Kathryn Sullivan.

The early evening light illuminating this team of researchers in Thailand lent the picture a surprising painterly quality. They were catching bats as part of an investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

Over the years Science has published many pictures of the James Webb Space Telescope, which promises to advance astronomy as much as the earlier Hubble Space Telescope has.  But this picture, of the tennis court–size telescope carefully folded together for launch and raised to vertical, was a fresh depiction, signaling that the telescope’s long development was at last complete.

Finding a unique way to show a familiar scene is a recurring theme at Science. We have many articles on solar power, so it’s often a challenge to find a new way to visually report on it. This image was an entirely new view we hadn’t seen before, showing someone cleaning the cells on the inside portion, creating a beautiful silhouette complemented by the graphic lines of the photovoltaic cells.

Finding the right species in the right place at the right time can often feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. Thankfully, when we needed a specific subspecies of bald eagle shown in the Ozarks, we were able to find and work with Mike Martin to get the best image.

Mandy Barker collects plastic waste from the ocean and arranges it in ethereal compositions. Her alluring style tricks people into thinking they’re looking at something beautiful, then shocks them into reality. It was the perfect fit for our feature on plastic degradation.

Aboard the Polarstern, an icebreaker frozen into the Arctic Ocean, photographer Esther Horvath and drone operator Jakob Stark snapped this shot of the green lidar laser shooting up to the sky. They had less than 5 minutes before the frigid temperatures killed their drone’s battery and froze its wings.

This was photographer Dado Galdieri’s first assignment for Science, and the story—documenting researchers searching for animal diseases that might cause the next pandemic—was challenging to visualize. But Dado’s skillfully composed and lit photography transformed often-mundane situations into a series of iconic images.