Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2013
The Royal Observatory Greenwich, London
19 September 2013 – 23 February 2014
by MK PALOMAR
“… be amazed and fascinated and hungry for more.”
Alan Friedman, exhibitor
This is the fifth Astronomy Photographer of the Year exhibition. When Unesco held its International Year of Astronomy in 2009, the Royal Observatory established its own annual exhibition to celebrate the achievements of the amateur astronomy community.
Dr Marek Kukula, Public Astronomer at the Observatory, explains that advances in astronomy photography were initiated in the 1990s when images from the Hubble telescope: “Revolutionised the quality of astronomical images … and scientists and NASA bosses realised the opportunity to engage the public and build support for space research.” Ten years later, in the early noughties, he says: “Advances in digital camera technology and home computers made it possible for non-specialists to make images in very low light conditions and to digitally process them in ways that had not previously been possible.”
This small, exquisite backlit exhibition of selected images, chosen from more than 1,200 entrants worldwide, includes winners from Australia, China, Hungary, the UK and the USA. It is fitting that this show should be displayed in the Physical Observatory. Built in the 1870s to house new photographic equipment, this observatory is also home to the telescope from Captain James Cook’s first voyage (1768-71) aboard the HMS Endeavour, during which, while in Tahiti in 1769, he observed the transit of Venus across the sun. The contemporary photographic documentations in this exhibition, including Sam Cornwall’s Venus Transit, are surely our current method of exploring the very far beyond and unknown – until the next revolution in space flight can transport us physically across the galaxy. In the words of Plato (428-348 BC), which are quoted along a date line of astronomical thinking and discovery in a neighbouring display at the Observatory: “Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to others.” It is also true to say, as Douglas Adams observed in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.”
There is not much that isn’t mind-boggling about the observatory and all therein. As soon as you step through the entrance, you are invited to touch the oldest thing you will ever encounter. The Gibeon meteorite1 (on loan from the Natural History Museum), which fell to Earth (in Namibia) in prehistoric times, is around 4.5 billion years old. A black solid lump of iron and nickel approximately 60 x 100cm, strangely smooth and dense to touch, its rounded edges have, since its discovery in 1836, been silvered by a mass of astonished fingers. There is a visual connection between some of the photographic images in the exhibition of deep space and the meteorite. The intensely dense blackness, packed tightly with minute flecks of light that are endless masses of stars, echoes the surface of the meteorite: it looks like the place from which it came.
Each of the photographic images in this exhibition arouses astonishment – in the enormity of distance and size pictured, and also in the breathtaking aesthetics of form, colour and composition. As Ellie Arroway, in the film version of Carl Sagan’s book Contact, exclaims, on encountering “some celestial event” while being transported through deep space: “They should have sent a poet.”
Reference
1. rmg.co.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/on-display/anvilled-stars
EARTH AND SPACE. Winner and Overall Winner: Mark Gee (Australia), Guiding Light to the Stars. The skies of the Southern Hemisphere offer a rich variety of astronomical highlights. The central regions of the Milky Way Galaxy, 26,000 light years away, appear as a tangle of dust and stars in the central part of the image. Two even more distant objects are visible as smudges of light in the upper left of the picture. These are the Magellanic Clouds, two small satellite galaxies in orbit around the Milky Way. © Mark Gee.
EARTH AND SPACE. Runner Up: Fredrik Broms (Norway), Green Energy. The shifting lights of the Aurora Borealis can take on many shapes and forms as they are moulded by the Earth’s complex magnetic field. Sheets and planes of glowing gas appear to be twisted into a giant vortex above Grøtfjord in Norway. © Fredrik Broms.
DEEP SPACE. Winner: Adam Block (USA), Celestial Impasto: Sh2 - 239. Structures like this often seem unchanging and timeless on the scale of a human lifetime. However, they are fleeting and transient on astronomical timescales. Over just a few thousand years the fierce radiation from the stars in this nebula will erode the surrounding clouds of dust and gas, radically altering its appearance. © Adam Block.
DEEP SPACE. Runner Up: Tom O’Donoghue (Ireland), Rho Ophiuchi and Antares Nebulae. The smoky appearance of the dust clouds in this image is fitting, since the grains of dust which make up the nebula are similar in size to particles of smoke here on Earth. The dust can reflect the light of nearby stars, as seen in the blue and yellow regions. It can also block and absorb the light of more distant stars, appearing brown and black in this image. To the right a bright star is ionizing a cloud of hydrogen gas, causing it to glow red, while below it far in the distance, is a globular cluster containing thousands of stars. © Tom O’Donoghue.
OUR SOLAR SYSTEM. Winner: Man-To Hui (China), Corona Composite of 2012: Australian Totality. This image is a demonstration of both precision timing and rigorous post-processing. It gives the viewer a window onto the elusive outer atmosphere of the Sun – the corona. A natural dimming of the Sun’s blinding brightness, courtesy of the Moon, reveals the ghostly glow of gas that has a temperature of one million degrees Celsius. For centuries total solar eclipses were the only way to study this hidden treasure of the Sun. By photographing this event, the breathtaking experience of viewing a total solar eclipse is captured indefinitely. © Man-To Hui.
OUR SOLAR SYSTEM. Runner Up: Alan Friedman (USA), Magnetic Maelstrom. The darkest patches or ‘umbrae’ in this image are each about the size of Earth, with the entire region of magnetic turmoil spanning the diameter of ten Earths. This image captures rich details directly around the sunspots, and further out in the so-called ‘quiet’ Sun where simmering hot plasma rises, cools and falls back. This produces a patchwork surface like a pot of boiling water, but on an epic scale – each bubbling granule is about the size of France. © Alan Friedman.