Perhaps more than any other type of photography, astrological photography is incredibly impressive: the degree of patience and control required to get good photos of the night sky, let alone distant stars and planets, is hard to overstate.
That’s one reason why awards dedicated entirely to astronomy photography are awarded each year, and the list has just been released for the biggest gong in this area – Astronomy Photographer Insight Investment of the Year 2020.
The green lady
This stunning image has it all: Northern Lights dancing in the sky, in a sublime mix of greens and blues, all suspended over a frozen lake and the touches of human habitation in the form of that lit little town. It’s kind of wonderful, really.
The many jets and shells of Centaurus A
An amazing image of the infinite variety of spaces, with those prominent jets in the center providing a science fiction focal point. This looks like something out of Star Wars, right?
The moon and the fragment
The moon floats ominously behind the London Shard, everything lit up perfectly to highlight the building’s construction in contrast to the marvellou detail captured on the moon’s surface.
Iceland
Aptly titled, this photo does an amazing job balancing the deep, luscious color of dawn in the sky with the amazing spectacle that is projected onto the impossibly clear chunks of ice on the ground.
Ineffable
This photo takes him behind the curtain, showing a lone photographer taking a picture of an eclipse and showing how remote he must travel to find the best light.
AR 2741 and AR 2740 sunspots
The sun’s surface is a bit of a mystery to most of us laymen, but we all know that there are sunspots: here is an impressive image that captures only two of them, without depending on the enormous energy that their appearance really brings.
Desert Magic
A desert scene that is beautifully illuminated by the heterogeneous mix of light and stars in the sky above, a beautifully suspended constellation and galaxy.
Dance on the swamp
We don’t usually think that the aurora borealis occurs over swamps, but here it is nonetheless, and that placid reflection is the key to the stellar success of this photo.
Galactic portal
Once again, here the contrast between the earth and the sky is the key, with the incredible purples and pinks of the night that illuminate the frame beautifully, seen from within a group of rocks that frame the action.
Painting the sky
That amazing selection of colors, illuminating the sky in a way that most of us will never live to see in person, creates an amazing picture. We think this picture is perfectly named.
Jupiter Rising
It is not an easy task to capture the surface of a planet like Jupiter in this way, from such a great distance, but this image gives you a great feeling of chaos that its surface would really be.
Moon shot
This great shot is a miracle of time, with a cloud of clouds passing before the moon and causing this otherworldly effect: it’s like a giallo horror movie, and we love it.
Qualified
This striking lapse of time over some paddy fields is a beautiful reminder of how the passage of time is inevitable, and we love how the exhibition concentrates the lights of human dwellings in the center of the frame.
Milky Way and Meteorite at Porthgwarra
The boat in the image is a perfect focal point, uniting the two almost symmetrical sides of the composition and attracting the viewer. We can’t be the only ones who would love to go on a journey, right?
Trixy
Photographer Trixy’s dog is the star of the show here, artfully cropped in front of a huge, bright moon, the focal length makes it look almost impossibly large. It is a delicious and fun composition.
Written by Max Freeman-Mills. Dan Grabham edition.
