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The top astronomy photographs of 2020
Each year, astrophotographers compete for the Insight Investment Astronomy Photographer of the Year award. Check out this year's winning entries.
By Hailey Rose McLaughlin | Published: Tuesday, September 22, 2020
RELATED TOPICS: IMAGING
Nicolas Lefaudeux
The Insight Investment Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition recognizes the most stunning images produced each year by professional and amateur astroimagers across the globe. This competition, now in its twelfth year, attracted more than 5,000 entries from six continents in 2020. Judges narrowed down the images by category, including aurorae, the Moon, skyscapes, and more. The top three to five images in each category received awards.
Curious fans are in London, England, can visit the contest's physical exhibit at the National Maritime Museum. But while travel restrictions may make it harder to see the photos in person, you can also purchase the official book, which includes all the winning images, released by the museum.
Below are some of the highest-rated images from the 2020 competition. Photographers interested in submitting their work for next year's competition can find more information here.
Andromeda Galaxy at Arm's Length?
Have you ever dreamt of touching a galaxy? This version of the Andromeda Galaxy seems to be at arm's length among clouds of stars. Unfortunately, this is just an illusion, as the galaxy is still 2 million light years away. In order to obtain the tilt-shift effect, the photographer 3D-printed a part to hold the camera at an angle at the focus of the telescope. The blur created by the defocus at the edges of the sensor gives this illusion of closeness to Andromeda.
Nicholas Roemmelt
The Green Lady
The photographer had heard a lot of stories about the 'lady in green'. Although he has had the chance to photograph the Northern Lights many times, he had never seen the 'green lady' before. On a journey to Norway, she unexpectedly appeared with her magical green clothes making the whole sky burn with green, blue and pink colors.
Alain Paillou
Tycho Crater Region with Colours
The Tycho crater is one of the most famous craters on the Moon. This huge impact has left very impressive scars on the Moon's surface. With the colours of the soils, Tycho is even more impressive. This picture combines one session with a black-and-white camera, to capture the details and sharpness, and one session with a colour camera, to capture the colours of the soils. These colours come mainly from metallic oxides in small balls of glass and can give useful information about the Moon's geology and history. The blue shows a high titanium oxide concentration and the red shows high iron oxide concentration. This picture reveals the incredible beauty and complexity of our natural satellite.
Ethan Roberts
HDR Partial Lunar Eclipse with Clouds
During the 2019 partial lunar eclipse, the photographer managed to capture this fantastic image of the Moon while a small cloud passed in front of it. You can see the Earth's shadow on the top right and its striking orange colour caused by the Sun's light passing through the atmosphere. This is a high dynamic range image, meaning both the darker, shadowed region is correctly exposed as well as the much brighter parts of the Moon. This processing technique also allows the clouds to be seen more clearly, giving the Moon a similar appearance to that of a solar corona.
Alexandra Hart
Liquid Sunshine
Solar minimum may be seen as a quiet Sun and deemed dull in white light, but if you look closely at the small-scale structure, the surface is alive with motion. This surface is about 100 kilometres thick and the ever-boiling motion of these convection cells circulate, lasting for around 15 to 20 minutes. They are around 1,000 kilometres in size and create a beautiful 'crazy paving' structure for us to enjoy.
Filip Ogorzeski
145 Seconds of Darkness
This image was captured during the total solar eclipse seen on 2 July 2019. The photographer travelled 13,000 kilometres from Poland to Chile to see the total solar eclipse. His plan was to create the most minimalist picture of this breath-taking event and capture the brief moment when nature freezes; the birds fly to their nests and the temperature drops during 145 seconds of darkness.
Here is a portrait of the Sun captured through a specialized solar telescope that transmits light at the calcium K-line – a narrow slice of the spectrum in the near UV. This wavelength shows the details of the low chromosphere – a crackling texture, here undisturbed by active regions or sunspots. This tranquillity is the signature of solar minimum. In 2019 the Sun showed no sunspots on 281 days.
Rafael Schmall
The Prison of Technology
The star in the centre of the image is the Albireo double star, surrounded by the trails of moving satellites. How many more might there be by the time we reach next year's competition? There could be thousands of moving dots in the sky. In order to create astrophotos, photographers have to carefully plan where to place the telescope, and this will be more difficult in the future with more satellites in the way.
Tian Li
Observe the Heart of the Galaxy
This image depicts the photographer climbing the radio telescope and Mingantu solar radio telescope array. First the photographer tested and moved his camera so that the M8 and M20 nebulae would appear right next to the telescope. After taking the foreground image, he moved his camera a little bit but still pointing at the same location in the sky, and captured the background with an equatorial mount.
Yang Sutie
AZURE Vapor Tracers
At the top of fjords in Arctic Norway, the photographer was met with an unknown sky. Was it aliens? Was it the supernatural? He captured a series of photos to record the night and didn't know until the next day that the colours were actually created by the 'Auroral Zone Upwelling Rocket Experiment (AZURE)' from Andøya Space Centre which dispersed gas tracers to probe winds in Earth's upper atmosphere.
Łukasz Sujka
Space Between US…
This image shows the really close alignment of the Moon and Jupiter that happened on 31 October 2019. In the full resolution picture, you'll see that there are three of Jupiter's moons also visible. This small project is a big challenge that involves a lot of luck and good seeing conditions. To capture this phenomenon in such a big scale was quite demanding in data acquisition as Jupiter and the Moon travelled across the sky quite fast. It happened in altitude only 9 degrees above the horizon. I wanted to show the huge emptiness and the size of space, which is why there is a lot of 'nothing' between the two major parts of the image.
The Outer Reaches
On 3 December 2019, the cloud cleared around mid-evening to reveal exceptionally steady skies over the photographer's home in the UK. Making the most of the conditions, he turned his telescope to the distant planet Uranus and started gathering video frames using an infrared filter to bring out cloud details on this otherwise visually bland planet. To get the best images, a photographer must average the best of many short exposures. For an object as faint as Uranus, this means the individual frames are very noisy. That night, even through these noisy preview frames, the lighter polar region could be easily seen – a most exceptional situation and a testament to the steady skies that night.
Robert Stephens
The Ghost of Alnilam and a Near Earth Asteroid
Sometimes, what appears to be a disaster in astronomical imaging actually becomes a nice composition. The photographer's telescopes normally observe and study near-Earth asteroids. While following the asteroid (11405) 1999 CV3, he was surprised to see an extremely bright star. It was the 1.8 magnitude Alnilam, the middle star in the Belt of Orion. It cast internal reflections throughout the telescope, but fortunately they avoided the asteroid crossing the centre of the field of view. This near-Earth asteroid was approximately 78 million miles away at the time. Alnilam is about 2,000 light years away, meaning the light we are seeing now left the star in biblical times. The light that left the asteroid was about eight minutes old.
Thomas Kast
Painting the Sky
The photographer was searching for clear skies in Finnish Lapland to capture the beauty of a polar night and couldn't believe his eyes when he saw what was waiting behind the clouds. Polar stratospheric clouds are something the photographer has been searching for many years and had seen only in photographs until that day. He took his camera onto a frozen river to get a good view and started to take photos. The clouds slowly changed their shape and colours. It was like watching someone painting, especially when the Sun was lower – it started to get a darker orange and the pink shades became stronger.
Stefan Leibermann
Desert Magic
The photographer took this image during a trip through Jordan. He stayed for three days in the desert at Wadi Rum. During the night, the photographer tried to capture the amazing starry sky over the desert. He used a star tracker device to capture the sky. The photographer found this red dune as a foreground and captured the imposing Milky Way centre in the sky.
Weijian Chen
Voice of the Universe
This is the aerial radar tower on the edge of the city of Taiyuan. Looking up from the middle of the mountain, it is more like a launch tower that communicates with extra-terrestrial civilizations. Between the mountains there is no sound. Facing the east, we can see the stars shining. It is here we seem to hear the voice of the Universe.
Cosmic Inferno
NGC 3576 is a well-known nebula in southern skies, but is shown here without any stars. Software reveals just the nebula, which has been mapped into a false colour palette. The scene takes on the look of a celestial fire-maelstrom. The image is intended to reflect media images taken in Australia during 2019 and 2020, where massive bushfires caused the destruction of native forests and have claimed over 12 million acres of land. It shows nature can act on vast scales and serves as a stark warning that our planet needs nurturing.
Min Xie
The Misty Elephant's Trunk
The photographer imaged IC 1396, otherwise known as the Elephant's Trunk, in the Hubble palette from my light-polluted backyard in Coppell, Texas. This image presents the Elephant's Trunk surrounded by the emission clouds with a misty feeling and an emphasized blue doubly ionized oxygen area as the background. It really gives the feeling of the trunk emerging from the distance.
Alice Fock Hang, aged 11
The Four Planets and the Moon
Photographing a planetary alignment requires rigor and patience but also a lot of luck. That evening, despite preparing everything for a week, the photographer encountered clouds. The magic started after sunset, where the moonset, Venus, Mercury, the star Antares, Jupiter and Saturn could be seen over the Indian Ocean. By looking at the sky map, The photographer could see that Pluto was there also above Saturn but invisible in my image. Note also the presence of Alpha Centuari on the left of the image as well as our immense galaxy, the Milky Way.
Thea Hutchinson, aged 13
Detached Prominences
This is the Sun imaged from London in September 2019. This is a composite of two images, one exposed for the solar prominences and the other for the solar disc. The solar disc image was inverted, converted to false colour and blended with the prominence in Photoshop as a dark layer. This was the first time the photographer used this technique.
Logan Nicholson, aged 15
The Carina Region
This is an image of the Carina constellation, home to one of the biggest and brightest nebulae in the sky, the Eta Carina Nebula, seen in the top right. The photographer decided to heavily push the red in this image, which reveals the spectacular hydrogen-alpha detail. Also visible in the bottom left is the Statue of Liberty Nebula, plus many dark nebulae. It is a very dense region of sky! The photographer also included H-alpha taken through a filter to really make the faint nebulae shine.
Xiuquan Zhang, aged 12
Light Bridge in the Sky
The photographer visited Iceland with his mother in 2019. The sky there is wonderful every night. The photographer had never seen such a scene before! The aurora is magical, as you can see in this photo.
Winslow Barnford, aged 15
Collision Course!
This is an image of the Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31) as well as two smaller galaxies (Messier 32 and Messier 110). The photographer started collecting data on this target in Sequoia National Park, on a dark-sky trip, however due to technical failures he had to finish the image from his roof, under much heavier light pollution.
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