The cosmos is a hostile but beautiful place; from Earth, its phenomena—from our Sun and the aurorae it generates to nebulae and distant galaxies—are worth capturing.
The winners of the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photography of the Year competition are set to be announced this September, and in anticipation of the announcement we’re sharing photos on the observatory’s shortlist.
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Dolbadarn Castle in Wales was built in the 12th century and remains standing. Above it, the Milky Way looms just as it did centuries ago.
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Only the brightest stars in the Pleiades cluster are visible to the naked eye. Thankfully this image was taken using long exposures through a telescope, so plenty of the 1,000-odd stars in the cluster are visible.
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Mount Etna is a volcano in Sicily. In this shot, the comet 2022 E3—the so-called “Green Comet” that got so many excited when it made its close approach of Earth—flies behind the snowy mountaintop.
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This breathtaking image shows our galaxy’s cross-section over a mountain that straddles the French and Italian border.
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Star trails over trenches from World War I make for a weird dichotomy in this long-exposure photograph. The photograph took over five hours to produce.
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This photo shows part of a ghost town in Namibia. The Milky Way looms an illustrious blue-pink above.
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A comet named Leonard is seen here over the Negev desert. The comet faded from view in March 2022, when its orbit eventually brought it too close to the Sun. They should’ve named it Comet Icarus.
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This image is made up of two images of Mare Crisium, a lunar sea northeast of Mare Ttanquillitatis.
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Taken from St. Agnes, an island southwest of the United Kingdom, this image shows a star-studded portrait of the Milky Way.
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This stupendous shot of the Tarantula Nebula, which lies 161,000 light-years from Earth, showcases the range of colors present in the nebula’s tendrils. The nebula was imaged by the Webb Space Telescope last year.
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This is a Wolf Rayet bubble nebula. Wolf Rayet stars are hot, massive stars that are quickly losing their mass. The star is visible here at the nebula’s center.
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The Milky Way is in the background of this image taken on the Greek island of Naxos. In the foreground is a street art painting of Pandora done by the Balinese artist Wild Drawing.
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The spiral galaxy NGC 3521 looms serenely in this image, captured with two telescopes over a total exposure time of 19 hours. The image was taken from the El Sauce Observatory in Chile.
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This image was extracted from a 27-minute timelapse of a solar flare that occurred on April 30, 2022.
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This image includes the Small Magellanic Cloud at center, the globular cluster 47 Tucanae at top, and NGC 362, another globular cluster, at left.
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This is NGC 1097, a barred spiral galaxy that sits about 50 million light-years from Earth. The galaxy’s spiral arms are remarkably clear in this image, taken with two telescopes and multiple exposures totaling 12 hours.
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This ethereal shot of the cotton-candy-colored Veil Nebula showcases the supernova remnant’s shape and structure. The nebula is made up of hot gases including oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur.
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This image of Pluto was produced using NASA data, and was inspired by Cassini’s Carte de la Lune (map of the moon) made in the late 17th century.
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A shot of the sundial Arctic Henge in Iceland shows the sweeping green aurora above it; the aurora is caused by high-energy particles from the Sun interacting with Earth’s magnetic field.
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This shot of the aurora practically turns night into day. At right, the Moon looms a Sun-like orange in the sky.
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This photograph of the aurora shows the phenomenon over a large Norwegian mountain range.
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The Northern Lights loom behind rocks on the coast of Ireland in February 2023. A coronal mass ejection from the Sun allowed aurorae to be seen farther south than normal.
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In this shot, star trails make delightful arcs in the sky over a decommissioned radio telescope antenna.
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The Milky Way as seen from Botswana’s Okavango Delta. The region has little light pollution, allowing observers to see the structure with their naked eyes.
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This 11-hour exposure taken through a telescope shows the Jellyfish Nebula, a supernovae remnant in Gemini. The stars in the image have been removed to highlight the nebula’s other features: large billows of gas and dust.
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A solargraph of a Burger King in Illinois. Solargraphs are pinhole images that capture the Sun’s path in the sky. Each streak in the sky is a day of the Sun’s transit.
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Our galaxy’s cross-section—the Milky Way—is visible in this arresting image taken from White Desert National Park in Egypt.
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Jupiter is a gas giant and the largest planet in our solar system. Here, the world is accompanied by Europa (silvery) and Io (yellow, bottom-left), two of its moons.
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This shot of Saturn showcases the planet’s most iconic feature: vast ring structures that surround the gas giant. In this image one can make out the Cassini Division, or the gap between the two main ring structures.
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This shot of the Sun includes images showing the China Space Station’s transit of our host star.
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This image of the Sun showcases the star’s volatility. On its left, a large solar flare—about 435,000 miles long (700,000 kilometers long)—spews out from the star.
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A close-up of the Sun reveals a solar prominence, or an eruption of hydrogen, from its surface. As the photo references, the prominence resembles woolly mammoths ranging the solar surface.
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This image is actually a composite of three taken on August 1, 2022, from Argentina. The image shows the moon at sunset.
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This shot of the Moon shows Earth’s satellite 78% illuminated. It shows off the Moon’s craters and surface features in sharp detail.
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Source: Gizmodo