Top astronomy photographs of the year 2020

Solar minimum may be seen as a quiet Sun and deemed dull in white light, but if you look closely at the small-scale structure, the surface is alive with motion. This surface is about 100 kilometres thick and the ever-boiling motion of these convection cells circulate, lasting for around 15 to 20 minutes. They are around 1,000 kilometres in size and create a beautiful ‘crazy paving’ structure for us to enjoy.

The star in the centre of the image is the Albireo double star, surrounded by the trails of moving satellites. How many more might there be by the time we reach next year’s competition? There could be thousands of moving dots in the sky. In order to create astrophotos, photographers have to carefully plan where to place the telescope, and this will be more difficult in the future with more satellites in the way.

This image depicts the photographer climbing the radio telescope and Mingantu solar radio telescope array. First the photographer tested and moved his camera so that the M8 and M20 nebulae would appear right next to the telescope. After taking the foreground image, he moved his camera a little bit but still pointing at the same location in the sky, and captured the background with an equatorial mount.

At the top of fjords in Arctic Norway, the photographer was met with an unknown sky. Was it aliens? Was it the supernatural? He captured a series of photos to record the night and didn’t know until the next day that the colours were actually created by the ‘Auroral Zone Upwelling Rocket Experiment (AZURE)’ from Andøya Space Centre which dispersed gas tracers to probe winds in Earth’s upper atmosphere.

This image shows the really close alignment of the Moon and Jupiter that happened on 31 October 2019. In the full resolution picture, you’ll see that there are three of Jupiter’s moons also visible. This small project is a big challenge that involves a lot of luck and good seeing conditions. To capture this phenomenon in such a big scale was quite demanding in data acquisition as Jupiter and the Moon travelled across the sky quite fast. It happened in altitude only 9 degrees above the horizon. I wanted to show the huge emptiness and the size of space, which is why there is a lot of ‘nothing’ between the two major parts of the image.

On 3 December 2019, the cloud cleared around mid-evening to reveal exceptionally steady skies over the photographer’s home in the UK. Making the most of the conditions, he turned his telescope to the distant planet Uranus and started gathering video frames using an infrared filter to bring out cloud details on this otherwise visually bland planet. To get the best images, a photographer must average the best of many short exposures. For an object as faint as Uranus, this means the individual frames are very noisy. That night, even through these noisy preview frames, the lighter polar region could be easily seen – a most exceptional situation and a testament to the steady skies that night.

Sometimes, what appears to be a disaster in astronomical imaging actually becomes a nice composition. The photographer’s telescopes normally observe and study near-Earth asteroids. While following the asteroid (11405) 1999 CV3, he was surprised to see an extremely bright star. It was the 1.8 magnitude Alnilam, the middle star in the Belt of Orion. It cast internal reflections throughout the telescope, but fortunately they avoided the asteroid crossing the centre of the field of view. This near-Earth asteroid was approximately 78 million miles away at the time. Alnilam is about 2,000 light years away, meaning the light we are seeing now left the star in biblical times. The light that left the asteroid was about eight minutes old.

The photographer was searching for clear skies in Finnish Lapland to capture the beauty of a polar night and couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw what was waiting behind the clouds. Polar stratospheric clouds are something the photographer has been searching for many years and had seen only in photographs until that day. He took his camera onto a frozen river to get a good view and started to take photos. The clouds slowly changed their shape and colours. It was like watching someone painting, especially when the Sun was lower – it started to get a darker orange and the pink shades became stronger.

The photographer took this image during a trip through Jordan. He stayed for three days in the desert at Wadi Rum. During the night, the photographer tried to capture the amazing starry sky over the desert. He used a star tracker device to capture the sky. The photographer found this red dune as a foreground and captured the imposing Milky Way centre in the sky.

This is the aerial radar tower on the edge of the city of Taiyuan. Looking up from the middle of the mountain, it is more like a launch tower that communicates with extra-terrestrial civilizations. Between the mountains there is no sound. Facing the east, we can see the stars shining. It is here we seem to hear the voice of the Universe.

NGC 3576 is a well-known nebula in southern skies, but is shown here without any stars. Software reveals just the nebula, which has been mapped into a false colour palette. The scene takes on the look of a celestial fire-maelstrom. The image is intended to reflect media images taken in Australia during 2019 and 2020, where massive bushfires caused the destruction of native forests and have claimed over 12 million acres of land. It shows nature can act on vast scales and serves as a stark warning that our planet needs nurturing.

The photographer imaged IC 1396, otherwise known as the Elephant’s Trunk, in the Hubble palette from my light-polluted backyard in Coppell, Texas. This image presents the Elephant’s Trunk surrounded by the emission clouds with a misty feeling and an emphasized blue doubly ionized oxygen area as the background. It really gives the feeling of the trunk emerging from the distance.

Photographing a planetary alignment requires rigor and patience but also a lot of luck. That evening, despite preparing everything for a week, the photographer encountered clouds. The magic started after sunset, where the moonset, Venus, Mercury, the star Antares, Jupiter and Saturn could be seen over the Indian Ocean. By looking at the sky map, The photographer could see that Pluto was there also above Saturn but invisible in my image. Note also the presence of Alpha Centuari on the left of the image as well as our immense galaxy, the Milky Way.

This is the Sun imaged from London in September 2019. This is a composite of two images, one exposed for the solar prominences and the other for the solar disc. The solar disc image was inverted, converted to false colour and blended with the prominence in Photoshop as a dark layer. This was the first time the photographer used this technique.

This is an image of the Carina constellation, home to one of the biggest and brightest nebulae in the sky, the Eta Carina Nebula, seen in the top right. The photographer decided to heavily push the red in this image, which reveals the spectacular hydrogen-alpha detail. Also visible in the bottom left is the Statue of Liberty Nebula, plus many dark nebulae. It is a very dense region of sky! The photographer also included H-alpha taken through a filter to really make the faint nebulae shine.

The photographer visited Iceland with his mother in 2019. The sky there is wonderful every night. The photographer had never seen such a scene before! The aurora is magical, as you can see in this photo.

This is an image of the Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31) as well as two smaller galaxies (Messier 32 and Messier 110). The photographer started collecting data on this target in Sequoia National Park, on a dark-sky trip, however due to technical failures he had to finish the image from his roof, under much heavier light pollution.