People's Choice Award 2018

In this image, a weathered juniper tree in Montana’s northern Rocky Mountains stands in early winter, while the sky above is filled with star trails. I noticed this tree a couple of years earlier and told myself that I had to go back for one of these shots. It took several test frames of long exposures to make sure that I had Polaris in the right place, but eventually things lined up the way I had imagined. There was enough moonlight to give nice detail to the foreground, yet still plenty of dark skies to allow a high enough ISO to capture lots of stars.

I had spotted this composition during the day and had worked out where the Milky Way would be positioned in relation to the rocky headland. Since it was so dark, I decided to capture two separate exposures, one for the sky and one for the foreground, and blend them in post-processing to achieve the desired result with a more even exposure. The only form of artificial light was from the Lizard lighthouse with its light beams cutting the horizon.

It’s fantastic to observe the Milky Way on a clear night with only some cumulonimbus cloud near the horizon. In this image, the Milky Way is a static feature in the sky, while the thunderstorm is active, so it perfectly combines stable and moving objects.

Standing atop the Passo Falzarego shooting Ursa Major on a freezing night towards the end of Nautical Twilight, I decided I needed to get closer. Reaching for my other camera with a 50-mm lens attached to it, I was startled by a flash in the sky; time seemed to slow as I stood in awe and watched it fizzle out. After it had vanished, and thankfully not into the valley, which it looked set to do from this altitude, I realised that I had heard the shutter click while watching it – I had hit an exposure before reaching for my other camera! A rush of excitement hit me as I went to check the LCD screen, and there it was, the meteor below the dipper, over a snow-laden landscape with a slight pink hue from the jaded afterglow. Naturally I smiled a lot. I then did a long exposure to bring out grain-free detail in the foreground.

Our company of three travelled 2,000 kilometres to capture the Northern Lights. We went from the city of Yaroslavl in Russia to Teriberka on the coast of the Barents Sea, in the Arctic Circle. For four days we were unlucky with the weather, it was snowing hard and heavy clouds were rolling above the sea. Finally the sky cleared up and in the evening we saw what we had come such a long way to see! The Northern Lights were in all their glory, twisting gently in the starry night sky. Geomagnetic activity was pretty weak, but the sky was shining beautifully! All photos were taken on the coast of the Barents Sea, in Teriberka, where we stayed for five days. The tide eventually came in and soaked our feet but we were delighted with what we saw!

I spent an amazing evening squeezed into a tiny cave on lake Torneträsk in Swedish Lapland, minus 26 degrees Celsius and a magnificent aurora display. It was a major challenge to get everything in focus and I had to combine multiple exposures to be able to get everything sharp. The end result was worth the effort.

I shot this at Southern Bays near Christchurch, New Zealand. There had been auroral displays for a few nights but I was unable to shoot. I thought I’d try my luck and head out even though the Kp index wasn’t very high. I set up the iPano and programmed it to start on the bottom row. There wasn’t much activity during the test shots but by the time the iPano robotic panoramic head got to the middle rows the aurora had really flared up! Very lucky!

I realised it might be possible to image surface details on every planet in our solar system during just one year from my own back garden. In January, eight months after opposition, I had captured Mars sporting a tiny polar cap and dark features. Next, Venus in ultraviolet (UV), then Jupiter and Saturn, all showing rich cloud features. Then in September I had imaged details on the rocky face of elusive Mercury for the first time. One still night in early November I managed to record Uranus’s distinct polar region and the set was complete! The more challenging planets – Mercury, Uranus and Neptune – required IR imaging to bring out surface details and have been colourised to match their more normal visual appearance. Venus, using a UV filter to image the clouds, is shown as a greyscale image to also match its visual colouration. For comparison, all the images are displayed at the same angular image scale, at the same relative sizes as they would appear to the eye through a telescope.

This image was taken during an evening exploring the remarkable underbelly of the Breiðamerkurjökull glacial tongue in Iceland. Often when composing an image, I like to just stop in silence and look, often for extended periods. When I was in the ice cave, with no sound and no one around, it was incredibly peaceful. The longer I remained still and just watched, the more my eyes adjusted to the stars twinkling at the cave’s entrance. This image is homage to the peace and wonder I felt.

The Orion Nebula, also known as Messier 42, M42, or NGC 1976, is a diffuse nebula situated in the Milky Way, south of Orion’s Belt in the constellation of Orion. It is one of the brightest nebulae and is visible to the naked eye in the night sky. This image is the result of the efforts of two astrophotographers, who chose a common target of the Orion Sword area (one of the most beautiful areas of our night sky) using different equipment from their observatories, which are located hundreds of kilometres from each other.

Almost 5,900 light years away, towards the southern constellation Centaurus, lies a large beautiful nebula known as the Lambda Centauri Nebula. The intense light from stars in a young open cluster cause the surrounding gas to glow with a magenta hue from emission lines of ionised hydrogen atoms. In the centre of the image, seemingly suspended against a dramatic backdrop of glowing gas, is a group of Bok globules, which are dark, dense collapsing patches of gas and dust where new stars are frequently born. Discovered by the South African astronomer A. David Thackeray in 1950, these are now known as Thackeray’s Globules and are a favourite target for backyard astrophotographers and large professional telescopes alike. The largest globule is actually two separate clouds that overlap slightly, as seen from our vantage point. While they appear small in the context of the grand nebula, these overlapping globules are each 1.4 light years across and together they contain more than 15 times the mass of our Sun.

What do you do before an exam at school? For me, I took this image on an early Monday morning at 5.30 a.m., I was very lucky to get the meteor because I was shooting on a 50-mm lens. On the left side you can see the Moon, which was only illuminated at 13.5%. I went photographing on that morning because I wanted to capture the stunning landscape of the Alpe di Siusi with the autumn colours and the Moon shining on it.