Wikipedia:Picture of the day/August 2020

Theatrical scenery is used to provide a setting for a theatrical production. The main features are usually flats, two-dimensional canvas-covered panels painted to resemble three-dimensional surfaces or vistas. Other scenery types include curtains, platforms and scenery wagons. They all need to be light and portable, as well as durable. Construction of theatrical scenery is frequently one of the most time-consuming tasks when preparing for a show.

This photograph shows a model of the set designed for the first act of Giuseppe Verdi's opera Otello for a performance in Paris in 1895.

Set design credit: Marcel Jambon; photographed by the Bibliothèque nationale de France

The spotted trunkfish (Lactophrys bicaudalis) is a species of ray-finned fish in the family Ostraciidae, native to the Caribbean Sea and parts of the western Atlantic Ocean. Members of this family are known as boxfishes because they have a hard outer covering consisting of hexagonal, plate-like scales fused together into a solid, triangular or box-like carapace. Because of this casing, the body of the spotted trunkfish is not flexible, and locomotion is normally limited to slow movements performed by rippling its dorsal and anal fins and gently beating its pectoral fins. If faster motion is required, it can additionally use its caudal fin for propulsion. This spotted trunkfish was photographed at a depth of about 40 ft (12 m) at Bari Reef, Bonaire.

Photograph credit: Betty Wills

Reine is a fishing village located on the island of Moskenesøya in the Lofoten archipelago in northern Norway, serving as the administrative centre for the municipality of Moskenes, Nordland. A trading post was established here in 1743, and the village was a centre for the local fishing industry, with a fleet of boats and facilities for fish processing and marketing. In December 1941, part of Reine was burnt by the Germans in reprisal for Operation Anklet, a raid on the islands of Lofoten by British troops, who occupied the area for two days before withdrawing because of lack of air support.

Photograph credit: Simo Räsänen

This image shows Car 10 of the San Francisco cable car system photographed using strip photography, a technique that captures a two-dimensional image as a sequence of single-dimensional images over time. This technique can be implemented in various ways; in film photography, a camera with a vertical slit aperture can either have fixed film and a moving slit, or a fixed slit and moving film. One of the characteristics of strip photography is that moving objects are distorted based on the relative speed of their motion and the image capture. Slower-moving objects occupy more time, and thus appear wider, while faster-moving objects are narrower, as they occupy the slit for a shorter period of time. Stationary objects, particularly in the background, are rendered as a constant stripe.

Photograph credit: Dllu

The Augusta Victoria Hospital is a church-hospital complex located on the northern side of the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem, one of six hospitals in the East Jerusalem Hospitals Network. The hospital provides specialty care for Palestinians from across the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with services including a cancer center, a dialysis unit, and a pediatric center. It is the second largest hospital in East Jerusalem, as well as the sole remaining specialized care unit located in the West Bank or Gaza Strip. The complex also includes the German Protestant Church of the Ascension, with a circa 50-metre-tall (160 ft) bell tower.

Photograph credit: Ori Aloni

Abbey Lincoln (August 6, 1930 – August 14, 2010) was an American jazz vocalist, songwriter, and actress. Beginning in the 1960s, she made a career out of delivering deeply felt presentations as well as writing and singing her own material. Her lyrics often reflected the ideals of the civil rights movement and helped in generating passion for the cause in the minds of her listeners. She explored more philosophical themes during the later years of her songwriting career and remained professionally active until well into her seventies. She also ventured into acting and appeared on television, and in films such as The Girl Can't Help It and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. This photograph shows Lincoln in performance at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam in 1966, and is part of the collection of Anefo, a Dutch photograph press agency.

Photograph credit: Jac. de Nijs; restored by Adam Cuerden

Peasant Woman Binding Sheaves (after Millet) is an 1889 oil-on-canvas painting by Dutch Post-Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh showing a woman at work in a wheat field during the harvest. As a young man, Van Gogh pursued what he saw as a religious calling, wanting to minister to working people. Failing to find a vocation in ministry, he turned to art as a means of expressing and communicating his deep sense of the meaning of life. In his series of paintings of wheat fields, Van Gogh expressed through symbolism and use of colour his deeply felt spiritual beliefs, appreciation of manual labourers, and connection to nature.

This work is based on an 1852 drawing of a woman gathering wheat by Jean-François Millet. It is one of several paintings by Van Gogh based on the ten Travaux des champs engravings made for the journal L'Illustration from Millet's drawings of peasant life. Van Gogh's painting is in the collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Painting credit: Vincent van Gogh, after Jean-François Millet

Portsmouth Cathedral is an Anglican cathedral church in Portsmouth, England. A chapel was built on the site and dedicated to St Thomas of Canterbury in 1188, and became a parish church in the 14th century. Following substantial damage during the English Civil War, the tower and nave were reconstructed between 1683 and 1693. The building became a pro-cathedral when the Diocese of Portsmouth was split from the Diocese of Winchester in 1927. Plans to enlarge it were interrupted by World War II, and the building was finally consecrated as a cathedral in 1991.

This photograph shows Portsmouth Cathedral's three-manual and pedal, 49-stop organ, installed in 1994 by Nicholson & Co Ltd. The pipes originated from the John Nicholson organ of 1861 built for Manchester Cathedral, which had been relocated to Holy Trinity Church, Bolton.

Photograph credit: David Iliff

The Singapore National Day Parade is a national ceremony in Singapore that takes place each year on 9 August to commemorate the country's independence. The firework display seen here was part of the festivities in 2011, held at The Float @ Marina Bay, the world's largest floating stage and football stadium, located on the waters of the Marina Reservoir. In the foreground on the right is the lotus-flower-shaped ArtScience Museum, situated within Marina Bay Sands, an integrated resort that opened in the same year.

Photograph credit: Chensiyuan

The Battle of Scheveningen was the final naval battle of the First Anglo-Dutch War, taking place on 31 July 1653 (10 August in the Gregorian calendar). This oil-on-canvas painting of the battle, by Dutch marine artist Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraaten, shows a Dutch ship sinking in the right foreground and an English vessel on the left. In the centre, the Dutch flagship Brederode is engaged in furious action with English ships on either side, including Resolution. By late afternoon, twelve of the Dutch ships had either been sunk or captured and the Dutch retired; however, the English fleet was also badly damaged, and returned to port to refit. Both sides claimed a victory; the English because of their tactical superiority, the Dutch because their strategic goal had been achieved by the lifting of the English blockade of their coast. This painting is in the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Painting credit: Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraaten

Kirinia roxelana, the lattice brown, is a butterfly in the family Nymphalidae found in south-eastern Europe and the Near East. It is found in a variety of habitats such as warm, dry grassland and scrubland near woodland, forest verges, vineyards and olive groves, usually in association with rocks or stone walls. It is a large butterfly with a wing length of about 3 cm (1.2 in); adults are most commonly on the wing between May and July, while caterpillars feed on broad-leaved grasses. Like other members of its family, it stands on only four legs while the other two remain curled up. The wings are covered with minute scales, and their distinctive pattern help the butterfly protect itself by camouflage. This photograph shows a K. roxelana male resting on a rock in Mount Carmel National Park, Israel.

Photograph credit: Gideon Pisanty

Lietava Castle is an extensive ruined castle in the Súľov Mountains of northern Slovakia. It was built some time in the 13th century, most likely as an administrative and military centre. It occupies a strategic position alongside the Amber Road, a trade route along which amber and other goods were transported southwards from the Baltic Sea. Originally a four-storey tower, it was expanded and reconstructed under a succession of owners, before being abandoned in the seventeenth century. The ruins contain handsome fireplaces, wall inscriptions, coats of arms, and renaissance portals, which attest to its previous grandeur.

Photograph credit: Vladimír Ruček

Elsie Leslie (August 14, 1881 – October 31, 1966) was an American actress, the country's first child star and the highest-paid and most popular child actress of her era. She came to prominence in 1887 with her performance in Editha's Burglar opposite E. H. Sothern at the Lyceum Theatre in New York. She achieved further fame with her roles in Little Lord Fauntleroy in 1888 and The Prince and the Pauper in 1890. Leslie was a great letter writer, maintaining a correspondence with leading actors, actresses and statesmen. Although most of her correspondents were adult, two were girls nearer her own age: Eleanor Roosevelt and Helen Keller. She took a break from acting, returning to the stage in 1898, but did not manage to recapture the old magic as an adult. This photograph from 1899, taken by Zaida Ben-Yusuf, shows Leslie playing the role of Lydia Languish in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's play The Rivals.

Photograph credit: Zaida Ben-Yusuf; restored by Adam Cuerden

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (15 August 1875 – 1 September 1912) was an English composer and conductor. His greatest success was his cantata Hiawatha's Wedding Feast. This set the epic poem The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to music, and was widely performed by choral groups in England and the United States. Composers were not well paid; the work sold hundreds of thousands of copies, but he had sold the music outright for the sum of 15 guineas, so did not benefit directly. He learned to retain his rights and earned royalties for other compositions after achieving wide renown, but always struggled financially. This photograph of Coleridge-Taylor was taken around 1905.

Photograph credit: unknown; restored by Adam Cuerden

The 15th-century St. Joan of Arc Chapel was initially built in the village of Chasse-sur-Rhône, France. Originally called the Chapelle de St. Martin de Seyssuel, it is said to have been the place at which Joan of Arc prayed in 1429 after she had met King Charles VII of France. The present name was given to the chapel when Gertrude Hill Gavin, the daughter of an American railroad magnate, had the derelict building dismantled, transported to America and rebuilt beside her French Renaissance–style château in Brookville, New York, in 1927. The chapel was undamaged when the château burned down in 1962, and was later given to Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, once more being transported stone by stone.

Photograph credit: Leroy Skalstad

The pacu jawi is a traditional bull race in Tanah Datar, West Sumatra, Indonesia. In the race, a jockey stands holding on to a pair of loosely tied bulls while the bulls run across a muddy track in a rice field. Recently, it has become a tourist attraction supported by the government, and the subject of multiple award-winning photographs. Dramatic high-speed action, mud splashing, and the jockeys' distinctive facial expressions add to its aesthetic value.

Photograph credit: Rodney Ee

Alice Paul was an American suffragist, feminist, and women's-rights activist, and one of the main leaders and strategists of the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits sex discrimination in the right to vote. Along with Lucy Burns and others, she strategized events such as the Woman Suffrage Procession and the Silent Sentinels as part of the successful campaign that resulted in the amendment's passage on August 18, 1920. This photograph of Paul was taken in 1915 by the Harris & Ewing photographic studio in Washington, D.C.

Photograph credit: Harris & Ewing; restored by Adam Cuerden

Gaillardia pulchella is a North American species of short-lived perennial or annual flowering plant in the sunflower family, Asteraceae. It is often known as the Indian blanketflower, perhaps because of the resemblance of the inflorescence to the brightly patterned blankets made by Native Americans. It is a drought-tolerant plant native to northern Mexico and the southern United States, often carpeting fields and the sides of highways for miles in the summer and fall. These G. pulchella blooms were photographed in Aspen, Colorado.

Photograph credit: Rhododendrites

The New Sarawak State Legislative Assembly Building in Kuching is the meeting place of the Sarawak State Legislative Assembly, the oldest continuously functioning legislature in Malaysia and one of the oldest in the world. The current building was officially opened by Mizan Zainal Abidin, the Yang di-Pertuan Agong, in July 2009. The building is shaped like a nine-pointed star, and the roof design resembles a Malaysian royal umbrella. The debating chamber, with room for up to 108 members, is located on the eighth floor, with a public viewing gallery above. The lower floors house the members' lounge, offices, function rooms, meeting rooms, an auditorium and a surau.

Photograph credit: Uwe Aranas

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This is an animation showing geocentric satellite orbits, to scale with the Earth, at 3,600 times actual speed. The second-outermost (shown in grey) is a geostationary orbit, 35,786 kilometres (22,236 miles) above Earth's equator and following the direction of Earth's rotation, with an orbital period matching the planet's rotation period (a geosynchronous orbit). An object in such an orbit will appear to occupy a fixed position in the sky. Some 300 kilometres (190 miles) farther away is the graveyard orbit (brown), used for satellites at the end of their operational lives. Nearer to the Earth are the orbits of navigational satellites, such as Galileo (turquoise), BeiDou (beige), GPS (blue) and GLONASS (red), in medium Earth orbits. Much closer to the planet, and within the inner Van Allen belt, are satellites in low Earth orbit, such as the Iridium satellite constellation (purple), the Hubble Space Telescope (green) and the International Space Station (magenta).

Animation credit: Cmglee

The Bagnio is the fifth of a series of six oil-on-canvas paintings by English painter and pictorial satirist William Hogarth, created around 1743. The series, entitled Marriage A-la-Mode, depicts an arranged marriage and its disastrous consequences in a satire of 18th-century society, and is now in the collection of the National Gallery in London.

In this picture, the young earl has caught his wife with her lover, the lawyer Silvertongue, and has been fatally wounded by him. The setting is the Turk's Head Bagnio in Covent Garden, originally a coffee house which offered Turkish baths (a bagnio), but by Hogarth's time it had become a place where rooms could be taken for the night with no questions asked. As the murderer makes his escape in his nightshirt through the window, the countess begs forgiveness from her dying husband. Meanwhile, the noise of the fight has awakened the master of the house, who appears through the door on the right with the watch.

Painting credit: William Hogarth

The common blue (Polyommatus icarus) is a butterfly in the family Lycaenidae. It has a wingspan of 28 to 36 millimetres (1.1 to 1.4 in); the upper surface of the male's wings is an iridescent blue with a thin black border, while the female's wings are primarily brown, with a variable amount of blue. The underside has a greyish base colour in males and a more brownish hue in females. Common blues sequester flavonoids from their host plants and allocate these ultraviolet-absorbing pigments into their wings. Females do this more efficiently than males, and it is these pigments that attract males. This photograph shows a pair of mating common blues (male on the left, female on the right) in Yoesden, a nature reserve in Buckinghamshire, England.

Photograph credit: Charles J. Sharp

Charles Follen McKim (August 24, 1847 – September 4, 1909) was an American Beaux-Arts architect of the late 19th century. Along with William Rutherford Mead and Stanford White, he was a member of the partnership McKim, Mead & White. The firm's New York City buildings include Manhattan's former Pennsylvania Station, the Brooklyn Museum, and the main campus of Columbia University. Elsewhere in New York state and New England, the firm designed colleges, libraries, schools, and other buildings, such as the Boston Public Library and the Rhode Island State House. In Washington, D.C., the firm renovated the West and East Wings of the White House, and designed Roosevelt Hall on Fort Lesley J. McNair, and the National Museum of American History.

Photograph credit: Frances Benjamin Johnston; restored by Adam Cuerden

Santa Maria Maggiore is a major basilica dedicated to the Virgin Mary and the largest Catholic Marian church in Rome. This picture shows the interior of the dome of the basilica's Pauline Chapel, frescoed by Italian painter Cigoli between 1610 and 1613. It depicts the Assumption, with Mary being lifted up towards heaven, while the apostles, some standing and others seated, look on. She holds a sceptre, and around her, the heavens open and choirs of angels rejoice as cherubs cavort. At the apex of the cupola, God the Father is represented crowned by seraphim. Built by order of Pope Paul V, the chapel houses the image of Salus Populi Romani, and is built of marble and richly gilded and frescoed throughout.

Painting credit: Cigoli; photographed by Livioandronico2013

MS Silja Serenade is a cruiseferry built in 1991 by Masa-Yards at Turku New Shipyard, Finland, and owned by the Estonian shipping company Tallink Group. She is operated under their Silja Line brand, and has typically been used on a route connecting Helsinki to Stockholm via Mariehamn. Since June 2020, she has been operating on a route between Helsinki and Riga, sailing on alternate days from each capital city throughout the summer. This photograph shows Silja Serenade sailing through the Stockholm archipelago.

Photograph credit: Wladyslaw Sojka

Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841) was a Prussian architect and city planner. He was one of the most prominent architects in Germany and designed both Neoclassical and Neo-Gothic buildings, the most famous of which are found in and around Berlin. He was also a painter and a designer of furniture and stage sets.

This oil-on-canvas painting, entitled Castle by the River, was created by Schinkel in 1820. As an artist, his architectural talent shone through, and his buildings and landscapes are carefully drafted and meticulously executed. The painting is in the collection of the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

Painting credit: Karl Friedrich Schinkel

Bloody Saturday is a black-and-white photograph taken on 28 August 1937, a few minutes after a Japanese air attack struck civilians during the Battle of Shanghai in the Second Sino-Japanese War. It depicts a baby named Ping Mei, one of the few survivors of the attack, crying amid the bombed-out wreckage of Shanghai South railway station; the baby's mother lay dead nearby. The photographer, H. S. "Newsreel" Wong, owned a camera shop in Shanghai and provided photographs and films for various newspapers and agencies. Within a year of its publication, the photograph had been seen by more than 136 million people around the world, and became a cultural icon demonstrating Japanese wartime atrocities in China.

Photograph credit: H. S. Wong; restored by Yann Forget

The Buddha Park of Ravangla is situated near Ravangla in South Sikkim district of the Indian state of Sikkim. It was constructed between 2006 and 2013, and features a 130-foot-tall (40 m) statue of the Buddha, pictured here, as its main attraction. The statue was erected to mark the 2550th anniversary of the birth of Gautama Buddha, and was consecrated on 25 March 2013 by the 14th Dalai Lama.

Photograph credit: Subhrajyoti Saha

Tooth and Tail is a real-time strategy video game developed and published by the indie development team Pocketwatch Games, loosely based on a design by founder Andy Schatz. It was released in September 2017 for Windows, MacOS, Linux, and PlayStation 4. The game is set in a society of anthropomorphic animals during a time of severe food shortage. The player assumes the role of a commander of an army of animals, and begins by choosing six units out of a pool of twenty to use during the game. The goal is to build structures and create units with which to destroy the enemy's resources. This screenshot of the game illustrates its heads-up display, along with various structures and units in a desert landscape.

Video game design credit: Pocketwatch Games

The bank myna (Acridotheres ginginianus) is a passerine bird found in flocks on the plains of northern and central India. Its usual habitat is cultivated farmland, usually in the vicinity of open water, but flocks will often live within cities, in markets and railway stations. Its common name comes from its propensity to nest in large colonies in holes excavated in the banks of rivers, although other sites are sometimes chosen. It feeds on grain, insects and fruits, and sometimes follows grazing animals, picking up disturbed insects or even ticks off the animals' backs. In towns, it makes use of food dropped by humans, even following catering vehicles at airports. This bank myna was photographed in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

Photograph credit: Charles J. Sharp