Astronomy Photographer of the Year, Royal Observatory

Making the slog up the hill from Greenwich town centre to the Royal Observatory – where the 2013/2014 Astronomy Photographer of the Year images are being exhibited – is always well worth the effort, if only for the view from the top. But this exhibition provides an added incentive to make the trip. 

The annual Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition has been running since 2009. Every year a panel of space scientists judges hundreds of international entries depicting the heavens at night – from the visible constellations in our sky all the way out to the milky nebulae of deep space. Of 1200 entries this year across four categories, the very best of them are on display until 23 February.

Many of the images that have made this year’s short- and longlists were produced with relatively traditional photographic equipment (SLR cameras with extender lenses and long-ish exposures) – but in some extreme cases the photographers have designed and built their own bespoke equipment and techniques. Images such as Adam Block’s Celestial Impasto: sh2-239 (winner of the Deep Space category) is a labour of 15 hours’ total exposure time, and many others in the category are ingenious composites of exposures taken over the course of many months.

But the most charming and often most spectacular images on display are those that lie closest to home. In the Earth and Space category, compositions combining images of the landscape with celestial bodies, such as Mark Gee’s Moon Silhouettes image (of the view-seekers at Mount Victoria Lookout, New Zealand) is stunning. Equally magnificent is the People and Space category, in which ingenious use of simple photographic techniques predominates.

This exhibition’s contributors are drawn from around the globe, and this international aspect is evident in the range of images on display in this rather small exhibition; an exhibition whose bijou proportions belie the cosmic proportions of its subject matter.