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Astronomy photos of the year Entries in the Royal Observatory’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest feature images of the transit of Venus, the Whirlpool Galaxy and other cosmic wonders. Photos by winners and runners-up will be on display at the Royal Observatory’s Astronomy Center in London until Feb. 5.
Earth and space: Winner
Taken in Nagano, Japan, this image shows Orion, Taurus and the Pleiades as the backdrop to an eerie frozen landscape. Although the stars appear to gleam with a cold, frosty light, bright blue stars such as the Pleiades can be as hot as 30,000 degrees Celsius.
Photographer: Masahiro Miyasaka (Japan)
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The Royal Museums Greenwich
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Earth and space: Highly commended
This long-exposure image contrasts the regular arcs of star trails with the chaotic swarming of fireflies. Celestial, natural and man-made light are captured in a single photograph.
Photographer: Michael A. Rosinski (United States)
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The Royal Museums Greenwich
Overall competition winner
This beautifully composed image of the Whirlpool Galaxy combines fine detail in the spiral arms with the faint tails of light that show its small companion galaxy being gradually torn apart by the gravity of its giant neighbor. A closer look shows even more distant galaxies in the background.
Photographer: Martin Pugh (Australia)
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The Royal Museums Greenwich
Our solar system: Highly commended
Perhaps the biggest astronomical event of 2012 was the transit of Venus, which took place in June. Transits occur when Venus passes directly between the Earth and the sun, appearing as a small black disc passing across the face of our parent star. The next transit will not take place for 105 years, in December 2117. This is a spectacular view of the active sun, streaked and blotched with filaments, sunspots and prominences. Venus, a world almost exactly the same size as Earth, seems dwarfed by the scale and power of our local star.
Photographer: Paul Haese
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The Royal Museums Greenwich
Best newcomer special prize
The Elephant’s Trunk seems to uncoil from the dusty nebula on the right of the image, its tip curled around a cavity carved out by the radiation produced by young stars. Capturing a deep-sky object such as this takes skill and painstaking attention to detail and is a great achievement for a newcomer to astrophotography.
Photographer: Lorand Fenyes (Hungary)
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The Royal Museums Greenwich
Earth and space: Highly commended
The Milky Way arches over a mirrorlike lake on Reunion Island. Piton des Neiges, the highest peak of Reunion Island, can be seen. The bright patch to the left of the image marks the bulge of stars at the heart of our galaxy. The photographer waited two years before all conditions were favorable for this photo to succeed.
Photographer: Luc Perrot (Reunion Island)
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The Royal Museums Greenwich
Our solar system: Winner
This is a single, unprocessed raw frame of this year’s transit of Venus, shot using a hydrogen-alpha filter. It was captured early on the morning of June 6 between second and third contact; the photographer’s first and only glimpse was taken through a thin patch in the clouds in London.
Photographer: Chris Warren (United Kingdom)
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The Royal Museums Greenwich
Young astronomy photographer: Runner up
This young photographer has knitted together several high-resolution images of the moon in the daytime sky to form a colorful mosaic. This wonderfully detailed view shows the smooth dark maria (lunar “seas”) and lighter, bumpier highlands of the moon. The peaceful blue color of the daytime sky is caused by the scattering of blue light in Earth’s atmosphere.
Photographer: Laurent V. Joli-Coeur (Canada)
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The Royal Museums Greenwich
Our solar system: Highly commended
This portrait gallery features four of our planetary neighbors in exquisite detail: the slender crescent Venus; Mars showing the famous Syrtis Major feature at the center and brilliant clouds over the Elysium Mons volcano on the right; Jupiter showing its moon Ganymede in transit, with the moon Europa on the right; and Saturn close to opposition, showing the remains of a giant storm the year before, as well as fine details within the ring system. The photographer shows the relative sizes of the planets as they appear to an observer on Earth. In reality, Jupiter and Saturn would dwarf the other planets, but both are much farther away from us.
Photographer: Damian Peach (United Kingdom)
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The Royal Museums Greenwich
Deep space: Runner up
The photographer set out to show not only the main subject of the image — a vast supernova remnant — but also the objects in the wide starscape that surrounds it. Straddling the constellations of Auriga and Taurus, Simeis 147 consists of the expanding debris of a massive star that exploded about 40,000 years ago. As the wreckage continues to spread out into space, it collides violently with the dust and gas between the stars, sculpting it into the glowing shells and filaments which have earned Simeis 147 the nickname of the “Spaghetti Nebula.”
Photographer: Rogelio Bernal Andreo (United States)
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The Royal Museums Greenwich
Deep space: Highly commended
Part of the Veil Nebula, the “Witch’s Broom” is the glowing debris from a supernova explosion, the violent death of a massive star. Although the supernova occurred several thousand years ago, the gaseous debris is still expanding outward, producing this vast cloudlike structure. In this image, narrow band filters have been used to greatly increase detail while giving a reasonable representation of the nebula's color.
Photographer: Robert Franke (United States)
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The Royal Museums Greenwich
Deep space: Highly commended
The spooky shapes that seem to haunt this starry expanse are cosmic dust clouds that fill huge volumes of space between the stars. The dust consists of tiny grains of minerals and ices and is an important building block for the formation of future stars and planets. The photographer had to travel more than 600 miles into the mountains of the Crimea to find a sky dark enough to capture this image.
Photographer: Oleg Bryzgalov (Ukraine)
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The Royal Museums Greenwich
People and space: Winner
This picture was taken on the wet sand at low tide on the beach at Treguennec in northwest France and shows the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter. One of the astronomical highlights of 2012, the conjunction was the period when the two bright planets appeared conspicuously close together in the sky. Their apparent closeness was an optical illusion – Jupiter was, in fact, much farther away than Venus. The photographer is pictured in the lower right corner of the frame, and the Pleiades and Taurus are also visible on the upper left.
Photographer: Laurent Laveder (France)
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The Royal Museums Greenwich
Earth and space: Highly commended
Dark mountain peaks frame two distinct lightscapes: the distant glow of towns and villages, and the majestic star fields of the Milky Way. Making the most of an August night, the photographer got this shot after trekking out to the Uludag National Park near his home town of Bursa, Turkey.
Photographer: Tunc Tezel (Turkey)
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The Royal Museums Greenwich
People and space: Runner up
The photographer came across two hikers lost in the wilderness of Yosemite National Park late one evening in July 2011. He captured this image of the tiny figures in a small bubble of torchlight set within a vast, pitch black forest beneath the immense dome of the sky. It highlights the wonder, beauty and awe of astronomy.
Photographer: Steven Christenson (United States)
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The Royal Museums Greenwich
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