Photographs have a special way of capturing moments in time, that would otherwise pass us by and leave us to our own imaginations to re-create scenes from historical events, breakthroughs in science and technology, as well as tragedies and natural disasters.

In this collection, we have a round-up of some truly powerful, awe-inspiring, and thought-provoking images for you to ponder.

A photo of Bruce McCandless floating untethered in space.

A bomb disposal expert walks to defuse a potential explosive device in Northern Ireland (1970) notice the sign on the left hand side.

On June 13th 1948, the #3 Jersey is retired in Babe Ruth's honor. Though he had not played for almost 10 years at that point, it was a very public and final farewell to the game.

A firefighter watches helplessly during a massive california wildfire.

African-American men, women and children lined up outside a flood relief agency in front of a billboard for the National Association of Manufacturers that a smiling white family of four (and their dog) riding in a car under a banner with the ultimately ironic slogan “World’s Highest Standard of Living. There’s no way like the American Way”.

A family flees the beach during the Tsunami that hit Indonesia in December of 2004.

Using long exposure, PhD candidate David Nadlinger took a photo of a glowing atom in an intricate web of laboratory machinery. In it, the single strontium atom is illuminated by a laser while suspended in the air by two electrodes. For a sense of scale, those two electrodes on each side of the tiny dot are only two millimeters apart. 1/2

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A young boy confronts his father's killer in a Middle-Eastern courtroom.

A photo from the ground in Nagasaki after the nuclear bomb was dropped.

The Pillars of Creation - A photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of elephant trunks of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, specifically the Serpens constellation, some 6,500–7,000 light years from Earth. They are so named because the gas and dust are in the process of creating new stars, while also being eroded by the light from nearby stars that have recently formed.

The Wright Brothers First Flight, which was the first powered, controlled, sustained airplane flight in history.

Big Jay Mcneely, Los Angeles Olympic auditorium , 1951 by Bob Willoughby shows the pure and transcendental power of music.

A utility worker attempts to resuscitate his co-worker with mouth to mouth after he was electrocuted by a high voltage line on the job.

Saturn. The Earth is visible too. The bright spot on the left, that's us. This is the modern equivalent of the pale blue dot.

On May 1, 2011, Pete Souza was inside the Situation Room as U.S. forces raided Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan compound and killed the terrorist leader believed to be responsible for the September 11th attacks.

The first Hubble Deep Field image was taken in 1996. More recently, NASA released the 'ultra deep field' which is much the same thing. An image that is one ten-millionth of the sky. Every speck of light in that image is a new galaxy, comprising millions to billion of stars. Check out this mind blowing and zoomable image here - https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1901a/zoomable/.

Lunch atop a skyscraper. Taken in 1932 from the 69th floor of the flagship RCA Building (now the GE Building), was staged as part of a promotional campaign for the massive skyscraper complex.

Two booster from the Falcon Heavy landing themselves back on earth via "autopilot" a first for the world of space travel.

'I Returned to Say Goodbye.' A Photographer named Joseph Wachira Shares the Final Moments of life for the Last Male Northern White Rhino.

The priest and the dying soldier by Héctor Rondón Lovera.

Australian Daredevil Felix Baumgartner in an almost unimaginable stunt, the 43-year old jumped from a specially constructed balloon at over 128,000 feet (39km) above the earth, breaking the world record for high-altitude skydives and speeds in free fall.