Image description: This photo, circa 1889, shows a ghost scaring two men. From the mid-1800s to early-1900s, “spirit photographs” were popular and easy to fake. Learn more about spirit photographs.

Photo from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Image description: The original caption for this image is, “New York City celebrating the surrender of Japan. They threw anything and kissed anybody in Times Square., 08/14/1945.”

Photo from the National Archives’ Still Picture Records Section

Image description: This photograph from 1943 shows a woman in Tennessee operating a hand drill while working on a “Vengeance” dive bomber.

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Image description: This photograph of stuffed specimens was taken in 1906 by Thomas Smillie, the first photographer for the Smithsonian. It is an example of the day-to-day documentation of Smithsonian life and museum installations that Smillie and his staff regularly performed. He used blue cyanotypes like this one to keep track of the glass-plate negatives his staff made, in part because the medium presented a quick and inexpensive way to create photographic prints. 

Image courtesy of Smithsonian Institution Archives

Image description: This photo of the moon’s north polar region was taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC. One of the primary scientific objectives of LROC is to identify regions of permanent shadow and near-permanent illumination. Since the start of the mission, LROC has acquired thousands of wide angle camera images and combined them to produced this mosaic, which is composed of 983 images taken over a one month period during northern summer. 

Image courtesy of NASA