The winners of Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2023 have been announced. Astronomer and competition judge Edward Bloomer discussed his personal highlights and showcased some of the winning and shortlisted entries for this year’s competition, organised by the Royal Observatory in London. “The universe itself is the astrophotographer’s playground,” he says.
This year’s winner – a deep-space photograph of the Andromeda galaxy by Marcel Drechsler, Xavier Strottner and Yann Sainty wasn’t only an aesthetically stunning image, says Bloomer, but showed a previously unseen region of ionised oxygen. “We don’t really know what’s going on there,” he says, “but we can sort of characterise it in a way now. We’re now in the process of investigating that.”
The Astronomy Photographer of the Year exhibition is now open at the National Maritime Museum, London.
Topics: