The cosmos, as you have never seen it before

This year's shortlist for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year has been released, and the images are truly out of this world.

Total Solar Eclipse by Gwenael Blanck. Blanck travelled to Australia to see the 62-second long eclipse and, in this collage, shows the corona and the pink chromosphere, the prominences and Baily's beads. The image is made of seven superimposed pictures.
Total Solar Eclipse by Gwenael Blanck. Blanck travelled to Australia to see the 62-second long eclipse and, in this collage, shows the corona and the pink chromosphere, the prominences and Baily's beads. The image is made of seven superimposed pictures.
(Image credit: Courtesy Astronomy Photographer of the Year)
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More than 3,500 entries from 58 countries were sent in this year to the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition, which meant that the panel of expert judges had quite a task creating a shortlist.

Among the 30 extraordinary images that they selected is an image of an aurora in the shape of a dragon, taken during a geomagnetic storm at the Arctic Henge, Iceland; an abandoned house below the Milky Way in the middle of the Namib Desert; the Milky Way above the Roques de García in the Las Cañadas caldera, Tenerife; and a 62-second-long solar eclipse captured in Western Australia. Below are some of our favourites.

This aurora takes the form of a dragon. Photographed by Carina Letelier Baeza, was the result of a G2 level geomagnetic storm and was captured at the Arctic Henge in Iceland.
(Image credit: Cari Letelier)

Another dragon in aurora form, this time captured by Moritz Tesler, who chose to use black and white to emphasise the contrast of the aurora against the dark sky.
(Image credit: MORITZ TELSER)

This image shows an abandoned house in the middle of the Namib Desert with the Milky Way above it. Stefan Liebermann produced this image by using a star tracker to lower the ISO.
(Image credit: Stefan Liebermann)

Yoshiki Abe visited the active peak of Nakadake in the Kumamoto Prefecture of Japan to snap this image. It shows how the Milky Way has watched over Earth since prehistoric times.
(Image credit: Yoshiki Abe)

The Milky Way and the Roques de Garciá, a formation in Tenerife, were gloriously captured by Andrea Curzi.
(Image credit: Andrea Curzi)

Jakob Sahner took this photograph of the Geminid meteor shower during perfect conditions in La Palma.
(Image credit: Jakob Sahner)

Both category and overall winners will be announced on September 12, with an exhibition of winners and shortlisted images opening at the National Maritime Museum, London SE10, on September 14 (currently, there is a show of last year’s competition, closing on August 27).

An accompanying book, Astronomy Photographer of the Year, Collection 13, will be published alongside the new exhibition (Collins, £30).

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Annunciata Elwes
Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.

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