News and Press

Less than two weeks are left to enter the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 17 competition run by Royal Observatory Greenwich in association with BBC Sky at Night Magazine.

Royal Observatory Greenwich in association with BBC Sky at Night Magazine, announces the dates for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 17 competition – the annual search for the most inspiring images of our cosmos.

In March 2025 the major exhibition Pirates will open at the National Maritime Museum (NMM), tracing the changing depictions of pirates throughout the ages and revealing the brutal history often obscured by fiction.

2025 marks the 350th anniversary of the Royal Observatory's foundation by Charles II.

The National Maritime Museum, Greenwich has acquired a rare and very special uniform and manuscript from the descendants of a former Naval Midshipman called Charles Hare. Hare was a teenage prisoner in Napoleonic France who successfully escaped by disguising himself as an officer in the French Imperial Customs Service (Les Douanes). This never seen before uniform went on display today in the Nelson, Navy, Nation gallery at the National Maritime Museum ahead of Trafalgar Day on Oct 21.

2025 at Royal Museums Greenwich will see the opening of a new major exhibition Pirates in March, which traces the changing depictions of pirates through the ages. The Royal Observatory Greenwich will be celebrating its 350th anniversary with a year-long calendar of public events including activities, talks and special planetarium shows. The mesmerising Astronomy Photographer of the Year exhibition will return to the National Maritime Museum in September, displaying another year of breath-taking space images.

The overall winner of Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year 16 is Ryan Imperio for his photograph, Distorted Shadows of the Moon’s Surface Created by an Annular Eclipse, that captures the progression of Baily’s beads during the 2023 annular eclipse.