Astronomy Photographer of the Year: Stunning images of the skies
- Published
Run by the Royal Observatory Greenwich, the Astronomy Photographer award features amazing landscapes, constellations and galaxies. This photo shows the Northern Lights over the famous Icelandic mountain, Vestrahorn. The photographer has used photo editing to bring three different pictures together.
This colourful image is called Busy Star, it was created by Sergio Díaz Ruiz, using data from a special telescope that monitors the sun in the extreme ultraviolet wavelength range.
There are nine categories of awards - Skyscapes, Aurorae, People and Space, Our Sun, Our Moon, Planets, Comets and Asteroids, Stars and Nebulae, Galaxies, and Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year. This photo in the Skyscapes category shows stars circling Polaris from under a natural arch.
The illuminated National Highway 219, the highest national highway in the world, is shown with the Milky Way above it - a perfect combination for the 'People and Space' category. The photo was taken in Shannan, Tibet, China.
In the 'Our Moon' category this photo - called Above the Lunar South Pole - uses two images of the lunar south pole created on two different dates to create an incredibly detailed photo of the Moon.
One of the themes captured by some of the entrants this year was the impact of pollution and light pollution on astrophotography. One of the entrants for Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year, Zezhen Zhou, had to overcome the light pollution in Shaoxing, China, to capture this image of Pickering’s Triangle, part of the Veil Nebula. Veil Nebula is a cloud of heated and ionized gas and dust in the constellation Cygnus.