The winning entries f rom Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2023
GALAXIES & OVERALL WINNER
“The Andromeda galaxy is the closest spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way and one of the most photographed deep-sky objects,” the judges note. “Yet this particular photo, captured by an international trio of amateur astronomers –Marcel Drechsler, Xavier Strottner and Yann Sainty –revealed a feature that had never been seen before: a huge plasma arc, stretching out across space right next to the Andromeda galaxy.”
WINNER: OUR MOON
Ethan Chappel “The occultation of Mars by the Moon was one of the last and greatest celestial events of 2022 and it was also one of the most challenging to image. To capture the level of detail on Mars that you see here takes a huge amount of skill and practice. Combined with a crisp, clear and perfectly processed lunar limb, the result is like taking a gigantic telephoto lens into lunar orbit itself. This image is a technical marvel and a real treat to look at –two factors that make it a worthy winner in this category.”
WINNER: OUR SUN
Eduardo Schaberger Poupeau “This is such a clever image. While we’ve seen the granulation and surface of the Sun before, I’ve never seen a filament shaped like a question mark. If you zoom into the surface of the Sun, the image has a paint-like quality – it feels as though you can see the brush strokes. There’s a sense of movement and if you stare long enough, you can almost see the question mark filament moving.”
WINNER: SIR PATRICK MOORE PRIZE FOR BEST NEWCOMER
“The perseverance and stamina of astrophotographers is what makes us truly stand out in the photography field. Here is an image that really brings home the application required, especially when focusing on the deep sky. This photographer has really put in the hours and studied their craft to create a beautiful image of this field of nebulosity. With subtle but varying colours across the whole palette, the dark twisting lanes of dust are resolved in exquisite detail and the stars are perfectly round with no hint of trailing. All this from a newcomer to the hobby. It shows that, even at the early stages of astrophotography, there are no limits to what we can achieve.”
WINNER: ANNIE MAUNDER PRIZE FOR IMAGE INNOVATION
“Most of the information in the universe is imperceptible to human senses (or delivered by mechanisms that would annihilate an observer), yet many modern astronomical developments are about capturing such information. Interpreting and presenting that information is vital and here is an interesting visualisation of astronomical data that we could not ‘see’ by ourselves, nor ‘hear’. Using water, a macro lens and audio source material
