A hummingbird confronting a pit viper has gained him an enormous amount of attention.

Of 338 known species, approximately 50 types of these birds live or breed in the tropical lowlands and cloud forests of Costa Rica, where arboreal vipers also live amid the thick foliage. This remarkable photograph of a hummingbird confronting a pit viper has gained him an enormous amount of attention. The vivid colors were produced by cleverly utilizing flashes and something that is hard to master, but is no problem for Bence.

Bence Máté is well-known as one of the world’s greatest wildlife photographers. In the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition alone, Bence has placed a total of 17 times and counting. Bence Mate took the title of “Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year” in 2002, and then the adult prize of “Wildlife Photographer of the Year” in 2010.

Source Valid Mesic

A roseate spoonbill meanders across the wet sand on an early morning in Fort De Soto, Florida

A roseate spoonbill meanders across the wet sand on an early morning in Fort De Soto, Florida, 

Photo Credit

Lady Musgrave Island, Great Barrier Reef, Australia.

Lady Musgrave Island, Great Barrier Reef, Australia. Lady Musgrave Island is a 14 hectares coral cay on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, with a 1,192 hectares surrounding reef. The island is the second island in the Great Barrier Reef chain of islands, and is most easily reached from the town of 1770, Queensland, located on approximately 5 hours north of Brisbane. It is named for the wife of Sir Anthony Musgrave, a colonial governor of Queensland.

This photo comes from the beautiful Shiraito Falls in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan.

It's not all just rocks and flowing water - there's all sorts of lovely natural growth around the basin. The harmony of life in creation is quite a wonder.

Letchworth State Parks middle falls on the Genesee River, New York State, USA

Letchworth State Parks middle falls on the Genesee River, New York State, USA, photo by tenfrozentoes.

Ama Dablam is a mountain in the Himalaya range of eastern Nepal.

Ama Dablam is a mountain in the Himalaya range of eastern Nepal. The main peak is 6,856 metres; the lower western peak is 6,170 metres. Ama Dablam is one of the most beautiful peaks in the Himalaya. It is situated in the heart of Everest's Khumbu Region. Ama Dablam means "Mother's necklace".

Mount Everest

Straddling the border between Nepal and Tibet, Mount Everest (named in 1856 in honor of Sir George Everest responsible for triangulation of British Indies) is the highest mountain peak in the world that the Sherpas climb proudly at the head tourist expeditions as final prayers in honor of the "Sea Goddess of the Earth" (Chomolungma) providing food to the people from his high astral top.

Scaly-breasted munias are estrildid finches native to tropical Asia and are distributed from India and Sri Lanka to Indonesia and the Philippines.

Scaly-breasted munias are estrildid finches native to tropical Asia and are distributed from India and Sri Lanka to Indonesia and the Philippines. They have been introduced Puerto Rico, Australia and the USA

The blue lights on the sea coast are the glowing firefly squid of Toyama, Japan.

The blue lights on the sea coast are the glowing firefly squid of Toyama, Japan. Each tentacle has an organ called a photophore, which produces light. When flashed, these lights attract small fish, on which the squid can then feed.

Mount Ararat, a 5000-metre-high dormant volcano, makes for a fantastic vista and is the highest mountain in Turkey. It’s no wonder that Arthur George Davtyan chose this "legendary" mountain as his favourite view.

Mount Ararat, a 5000-metre-high dormant volcano, makes for a fantastic vista and is the highest mountain in Turkey. It’s no wonder that Arthur George Davtyan chose this "legendary" mountain as his favorite view.

The Twelve Apostles.

The Twelve Apostles is a collection of limestone stacks off the shore of the Port Campbell National Park, by the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, Australia. Their proximity to one another has made the site a popular tourist attraction.

Passo Gardena is a high mountain pass elevation; 7008 feet in the Italian Dolomites

Passo Gardena is a high mountain pass elevation; 7008 feet in the Italian Dolomites, connecting Sëlva in the Val Gardena on the west side with Corvara in the Val Badia. The mountains here are part of the Sella group. I had done some scouting here earlier in the afternoon and couldn't surely decide what I wanted for a foreground; big sheets of snow still leftover or rare patch of flowers that were beginning to finally bloom; I clearly decided to go with the latter. I also went back and forth about cloning out the car down there (my rental!), but thought it gave a decent sense of scale here, so I kept it. It might wind up going back and axing it, though. I wanted to stick around to shoot some stars after nightfall, but temperatures rapidly dropped below freezing my hands and feet were numb at the end of this photograph and I was sadly not equipped to spend hours out in that kind of weather. Source: Chris Lazzery

K2 Mountain 8,611 meters (28,251 ft) GB, Himalaya Pakistan.

The name K2 is derived from the notation used by the Great Trigonometric Survey. In the 1850s Thomas Montgomerie made the first survey of the Karakoram from Mount Haramukh, some 130 miles to the south, and sketched the two most prominent peaks, labeling them K1 and K2. It is famous as the Savage Mountain due to the difficulty of ascent and the high fatality rate among those who climb it. Almost every four people who have reached the K2 summit, one has died trying.

Chulyshman River is a river in Altai Republic in Russia.

Chulyshman River is a river in Altai Republic in Russia. The length of the river is 241 km. The area of its basin is 16,800 km². The Chulyshman flows into Lake Teletskoye. It freezes up during late October - early December and stays icebound until late March - early May

Lava flowing out of the Piton de la Fournaise volcano

This beautiful photograph is taken on June 21, 2014, when it shows lava flowing out of the Piton de la Fournaise volcano, one of the world's most active volcanoes, located on the French island of La Reunion in the Indian Ocean. The Piton de la Fournaise started to erupt early on June 21. (Photo by Richard Bouhet/AFP Photo)

An Early Morning on Mount Zugspitze - High in the Alps, Germany

Early Morning on Mount Zugspitze - High in the Alps, Germany. The Zugspitze, at 2,962 m above sea level, is the highest peak of the Wetterstein Mountains as well as the highest mountain in Germany.

 

Photo by Torsten Muehlbacher

NASA Releases Stunningly Colorized Photograph of Our Sun

NASA's SDO (Solar Dynamics Observatory) has just released this stunning, painterly image of the Sun. The Solar Dynamics observatory was designed to assist us to know about the Sun's influence on Earth and near-Earth space by studying the solar atmosphere. In this lovely image, NASA's sun-gazing spacecraft spotted an unusual series of eruptions, forced by fast "puffs" from the Sun's outermost atmosphere (the corona), to interplanetary space. It starts on January 17, 2013, the puffs took place about once every 3 hours, and then after twelve hours, larger eruptions occurred.

Nathalia Alzate a solar scientist at the University of Aberystwyth in Wales said; if you look at the corona in intense ultraviolet light we can review the source of the puffs is a series of energetic jets and related flares. The jets are localized, disastrous releases of energy that spew material out from the sun into space. These swift changes in the magnetic field cause flares, which release an enormous amount of energy in a very limited time in the form of super-heated plasma, high-energy radiation and radio bursts. The large, slow structure is unwilling to erupt, and does not originate to smoothly propagate outwards until numerous jets have occurred. 

We still need some time to evaluate whether these’re shock waves, formed by the jets, passing through and driving the slow eruption, or whether magnetic reconfiguration is driving the jets letting the bigger, slow structure to slowly erupt. Many thanks to latest advances in observation and in photo processing techniques we can throw light on the way jets can lead to small and fast, or big and slow, eruptions from the Sun. She continues; this spectacular photograph is a combination of three wavelengths of light. It shows one of the multiple jets that led to a series of slow coronal puffs. The striking photo has been colorized in red, green and blue.

iWatch: Apple aiming for October 2014 smart watch launch.