Wikipedia:Picture of the day/December 2015

Typical

Photograph: Uwe Aranas

Two Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers stand with three vehicles, providing a size comparison of three generations of Mars rovers. Front and center is the flight spare for the first Mars rover, Sojourner, which landed on Mars in 1997 as part of the Mars Pathfinder Project. On the left is a Mars Exploration Rover test vehicle, a working sibling to Spirit and Opportunity, which landed on Mars in 2004. On the right is a test rover for the Mars Science Laboratory, which landed Curiosity on Mars in 2012.

Photograph: NASA

Self Portrait with Physalis, by Egon Schiele (1890–1918) completed in 1912. Schiele, an early expressionist painter from Tulln an der Donau, Lower Austria, produced numerous self-portraits during his career, including several in which he depicted himself naked. His works are characterized by twisted body shapes, intensity and raw sexuality.

Painting: Egon Schiele

Chromolithograph: Romanet & cie.

One of the Kasubi Tombs in Kampala, Uganda. The burial grounds of four kabakas (kings of Buganda), the tombs were first built in 1881 but destroyed in a fire on 16 March 2010. The Bugandan and Ugandan administration have vowed to rebuild this World Heritage Site.

Photograph: not not phil

US

Photograph: Pete Souza; edit: El Grafo

A boat tour among the icebergs on

The ruddy kingfisher (Halcyon coromanda) is a medium-sized tree kingfisher which is widely distributed in the forests of east and southeast Asia. Like other kingfishers, ruddy kingfishers generally feed on fish, crustaceans, and large insects, though in areas with less running water they are known to take frogs and other amphibians.

Photograph: Jason Thompson

Cliff Dwellers is a painting by George Bellows completed in 1913. It shows a crowd on New York City’s Lower East Side, with people spilling out of tenement buildings onto the streets, stoops, and fire escapes. The work was first displayed at the 1913 Armory Show, and is currently in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Painting: George Bellows

Lee Remick (1935–1991) was an American film and television actress. She made her film debut in 1957 with Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd, and went on to appear in more than twenty films, including Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), and The Omen (1976).

Photograph: Allan Warren; restoration: Keraunoscopia

The Gall–Peters projection, named after James Gall and Arno Peters, is a specialization of a configurable equal-area map projection known as the cylindrical equal-area projection. It achieved considerable notoriety in the late 20th century as the centerpiece of a controversy surrounding the political implications of map design; Peters promoted it as a more faithful representation than the Mercator projection, which inflates the sizes of regions farther from the equator and thus makes the (mostly technologically underdeveloped) equatorial countries appear smaller and therefore, according to Peters, less significant.

Map: Strebe, using Geocart

Sir Noël Coward (1899–1973) was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer. Coward published more than 50 plays, many of which have remained in the regular theatre repertoire. He composed hundreds of songs, well over a dozen musical theatre works, screenplays, poetry, several volumes of short stories, a novel, and a three-volume autobiography. Coward's stage and film acting and directing career spanned six decades, during which he starred in many of his own works and won an Academy Honorary Award in 1943. In the 1950s he achieved fresh success as a cabaret performer, performing his own songs. His plays and songs achieved new popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, and his work and style continue to influence popular culture.

Photograph: Allan Warren; edit: Adam Cuerden

The common kingfisher (Alcedo atthis) is a small kingfisher with seven subspecies recognized within its wide distribution across Eurasia and North Africa. It is resident in much of its range, but migrates from areas where rivers freeze in winter. This sparrow-sized bird feeds mainly on fish, caught by diving, and has special visual adaptions to enable it to see prey under water. The glossy white eggs are laid in a nest at the end of a burrow in a riverbank.

Photograph: Andreas Trepte; edit: Hans Hillewaert

A banknote for one

Banknote: De Bank Courant en Bank van Leening (image courtesy of the National Numismatic Collection, National Museum of American History)

Century-old buildings of the Historic Michigan Boulevard District stand near East Monroe Street and Millennium Park in Chicago, Illinois. These include the Monroe Building (1910), University Club (1907), Chicago Athletic Club (1893), Willoughby Tower (1927), and Montgomery Ward (1897). Behind them is the Legacy Tower, a 72-story skyscraper by the architectural firm Solomon, Cordwell, and Buenz, which was built in 2009.

Photograph: Diego Delso

American singer

The willow tit (Poecile montanus) is a passerine bird in the tit family commonly found throughout temperate and subarctic Europe and northern Asia. These birds feed on insects, caterpillars, and seeds, and nest in holes in (mostly conifer) trees.

Photograph: Francis C. Franklin

A map depicting the

Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877) is the best known painting by the French artist Gustave Caillebotte. This large oil painting shows a number of figures walking through the Carrefour de Moscou, a road intersection to the east of the Gare Saint-Lazare in north Paris. It was first shown at the Third Impressionist Exhibition of 1877, and is currently owned by the Art Institute of Chicago.

Painting: Gustave Caillebotte

The

Photograph: David Iliff

The

The first jet-assisted take-off performed in the United States. In this August 1941 test, an ERCO Ercoupe piloted by Captain Homer A. Boushey Jr. was fitted with a GALCIT booster and took off from March Field, California. JATO assisted take-off systems are used to help overloaded aircraft into the air by providing additional thrust in the form of small rockets.

Photograph:

Pellets of 99.9% pure

Photograph: Heinrich Pniok

A long-exposure shot of the finale of the second act of