BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Astro Photographer of the Year 2016 *new article*

The Sun as you've never before seen it. A twilight aurora, lunar landscapes, and galaxies far far away. There's all that and more in the Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2016 exhibition at the Royal Observatory Greenwich.

Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2016

Click here for the gallery of all of the 2016 winners. It includes the winner, runner-up and highly commended entries of the main categories. A feast for your eyes!

Yu Jun (China) was named Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2016. In this short video some of the judges say what's outstanding about it.

Here is Twilight Aurora, the winner in the Aurorae category.

The photographer was György Soponyai (Hungary). He said


One of the judges, amateur astronomer Jon Culshaw, said

Here's a little tale that's a bit like magicians making things disappear. But it's I.T. people who can do it more easily than magicians.

Moonrise at the Pier, panoramic image taken by Sergio Garcia (Mexico) in Galveston, Texas, was the Runner-up in the category Our Moon.

The link in the article was from the magazine Astronomy Now. And why was this? Well, when I tried to get it from the competition website, the Moon had been cropped out of the picture. Whoops! What was the category again?

In the article, I quoted one of the judges who had said

Well, a few days after the article appeared, I found that the Moon had been restored in the competition website image. BUT much of the rest of it was gone, so the above description didn't describe anything you could see in the image. Sigh.

There are articles on the Astronomy Photographer of the Year (under the topic: Tools of Astronomy) for every year since 2010. I've recently checked and replaced broken links in the articles for the first five years. Some weren't accessible to people who weren't Pinterest members, but most were due to changes in the website at Greenwich.

The work of Argentinian astrophotographer Ignacio Diaz Bobillo has shown up several times among the prizewinners in this competition. This year his 'Towards the Small Magellanic Cloud' was the Runner-up in the Galaxies section.

In the upper right you can see 47 Tucanae which is a globular cluster. Then the main event is a neighbor of ours, the Small Magellanic Cloud. It's a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way and is easily visible in the southern hemisphere.

One of the judges commented


(I've linked above to the BBC website because the image on the Greenwich website has cropped out 47 Tucanae.)

Highly Commended in "Skyscapes" is Geminids over the LAMOST telescope by Yu Jun (China). His name might be familiar - he was the overall winner of this year's competition for his brilliant solar eclipse composition. This meteor shower picture is stunning - what a beautiful sky.

Judge Will Gater said

It's titled "The Rainbow Star", but what do you think it is? One of the judges said that this selection of colored dots "could well pass as pop art.”

Steve Brown (UK) videoed the bright star Sirius, which is known for the way is shimmers and seems to change color. These effects are the result of distortions caused by our atmosphere. Brown videoed Sirius somewhat out of focus, and then chose the frames with the most vivid colors.

When the prize was announced, pop artist Brigid Reilly was mentioned. But I thought Brown's work was more akin to Damien Hirst's paintings of spots. Except that Brown's work has more substance to it than Hirst's who doesn't even paint his own paintings, assistants do it. But there is one spot painting that is unique. It lies on Mars with Beagle 2 where it would have been used color calibration had the lander been successful.

The winner in Planets, Comets and Asteroids was Damien Peach for "Serene Saturn". The detail and clarity of this image is typical for Peach's work, and he's no stranger to the winner's circle for this astrophotography competition.