17 Glorious Things You Can See If You Look Upwards
These breathtaking photographs are the winners of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year Competition
The 13th annual Astronomy Photographer of the Year Competition conducted by the Royal Observatory in Greenwich has produced an awe-inspiring array of images of cosmic phenomena, from colorful nebulae to solar eclipses to swirling storm clouds above Jupiter. The winner of the competition, “The Golden Ring,” by Shuchang Dong of China, is a spectacular image of the annular solar eclipse—starkly simple in its composition but mesmerizingly beautiful in its symmetry and in the contrast created by the yellow ring of the sun against the dark blue sky.
Chosen out of more than 4,500 submissions from 75 different countries, winning photographs were selected from a number of categories, including “Our Sun,” “Aurorae,” “Galaxies,” “Our Moon,” “Planets, Comets, and Asteroids,” and “Stars and Nebulae,” and each breathtaking photograph contributes in its own way to a deeper understanding of—and connection to—the wonder of space and the place that our planet has in the wider universe.
