Mind-blowing Astronomy Photo of the Year competition reveals strange galaxies and ‘space portals’ – The Sun – Zero Genie

Mind-blowing Astronomy Photo of the Year competition reveals strange galaxies and ‘space portals’ – The Sun

The 2020 Astronomy Photographer of the Year Awards received lots of impressive applications and you can see some of them below.

The winners of the Insight Investment sponsored competition will be revealed via an online Royal Museums Greenwich event on September 10.

Snapshots in the running for a prize include images of far off galaxies and celestial displays with Earthly backdrops.

This year has seen a record number of people enter the competition from almost 70 countries.

It’s said to be the biggest space photography competition in the world.

This image, called Galatic Portal, was captured by a US-based photographer.

Marcin Zajac took this photo in Australia in the coastal town of Kiama.

He went inside a cave to show how stunning the Milky Way looks from that perspective.

UK entrant Phil Halper is responsible for this eerie image of the Northern Lights.

It shows the famous Geysir of Iceland being outshone by an aurora.

Canadian astronomy photographer Terry Robison is responsible for this out-of-this-world image.

It shows the NGC 253 – Starbust Galaxy.

This can be found in the Sculptor constellation and is one of the brightest spiral galaxies visible to us on Earth.

Andreas Ettl is a potential winner from Germany who had to wait patiently to get this shot over an idyllic fishing village in Norway.

Fans of the London skyline might think this should be the winner.

This snapshot of the Full Moon and The Shard was taken by Mathew Browne.

Italian entrant Mario Cogo hopes to win with this image of a nebula.

This was taken under the dark Namibian sky over two nights in 2019.

This image shows the Milky Way above the Moai at Ahu Akivi, a sacred place in Easter Island.

It was taken by Dai Jianfeng, an entrant from China.

This image shows a visible sunspot.

It’s been coloured and enhanced to create this portal-like effect.

This mystical bat-like dust cloud was created when a star exploded.

The enhanced image, by Josep Drudis, shows a section of the Veil Nebula that looks like a bat.

The Milky Way is almost as old as the Universe itself with recently estimates suggestings that the Universe is around 13.7 or 13.8billion years old and the Milky Way is thought to be about 13.6billion years old
the Milky Way is disk shaped and measures about 120,000 light years across
It has a supermassive black hole in the middle called Sagittarius A*
It contains over 200 billion stars
It is thought to have an invisible halo made of dark matter

Giant black hole at centre of Milky Way exploded ‘recently’