These remarkable and intricate illustrations are the work of Mark Catesby, an English naturalist and artist who made numerous visits to North America in the early 18th century, recording the flora and fauna he saw on his travels.

His work is collected in a new book, by Stephen A. Harris, an exploration of the naturalist’s landmark treatise, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands. “Catesby presented his readers with illustrations of a wide diversity of plants and animals that were being discovered by Europeans in North America and the Caribbean,” says Harris. “Many of these were illustrated for the first time – Catesby became the de facto authority on them.”

Featuring more than 400 species, some of which are now extinct, several plates depict a plant and an animal in one image, such as the rough green snake (Opheodrys aestivus), shown top, curling around an American beautyberry shrub (Callicarpa americana). In a similar vein, a giant hermit crab (Petrochirus diogenes) sits on top of what, writes Harris, is “probably” an angular sea whip (Pterogorgia anceps), shown above.

Pictured above is a colourful mutton snapper (Lutjanus analis), and the deciduous plant Spanish jasmine (Plumeria rubra) is pictured below.

Catesby “hoped to stimulate curiosity in natural history – beyond the confines of the library”, says Harris. “His work speaks to modern themes of landscape and habitat change, changing species’ distributions and extinction and the value of traditional knowledge held by Indigenous people.”

You could be forgiven for thinking that this dramatic image is a still from a forthcoming science fiction epic, but it is actually the work of photographer Andrew McConnell, part of his in-depth series – and it is very much of this planet.

McConnell began documenting the movements of Russian Soyuz rockets in 2015. Every three months, a spacecraft takes off from Baikonur Cosmodrome, a spaceport in Kazakhstan, carrying three astronauts and cosmonauts on a 6-hour journey to the International Space Station. At roughly the same time, three space travellers come back to Earth, landing in the remote grasslands to Kazakhstan’s north-east.

This remarkable photograph from 2017 shows a member of the ground crew in front of the just-landed Soyuz MS spacecraft (US astronauts Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin are still inside the vehicle).

McConnell says that “often at these landings, the helicopters would arrive first with all the engineers and support crew”, making it challenging to photograph freely. With this shot, he was able to “get into position before the helicopters came and kicked up the sandstorm”, and knew immediately it was a “special image… unlike any other landing I had seen”. It felt, he says, “otherworldly”.

Opening with Kulash Akhmetova’s poem Prayer – “I saw sandstorms – they wiped out the steppe settlement / I saw rockets – like visions, they hovered above me,” she writes, in part of it – is out on 4 October.