Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2011 – with a lunar theme

Today’s image of the week is s little different. On Thursday I attended the award ceremony for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year along with fellow Moon Zoo moderator Geoff and Solar Stormwatch moderator ElisabethB (Els to her friends!) It’s a lovely event held at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich in the planetarium foyer and courtyard.  It’s also a great chance to meet people and tell them about our favourite citizen science projects. We were treated to a preview of the shortlisted photos in the planetarium. Huge images were projected onto the planetarium dome as Olivia Johnson from the ROG told us about each one to a background of spacey soothing music. No chance of falling asleep though as the images were so stunning! This was  followed by the presentation of the awards hosted by Marek Kukula, the public astronomer at the Royal Observatory, and our very own Chris Lintott. Then there was more chance to chat and mingle (and “work the crowd” as Els put it!!) and an early viewing of the winners’ exhibition before it officially opened to the public the following day.

Here we are just getting into the swing:
Geoff, Els and me

The judges had over 800 images to sift through this year to come up with a shortlist. What I found particularly interesting this year were the number of solar and lunar images. I will blog about the solar side of things separately but I thought it appropriate to showcase the lunar images here.

The Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year category produced some excellent images all from 15 year olds:

The winner of this category was Jathin Premjith from India:
Lunar Eclipse and Occultation

This is a lovely red eclipse photo with a star just emerging out of occultation at 3 o’clock.

Three of the highly commended entries (all from the UK) were lunar photos:

Lonely Moon by Peter Pihlmann Pedersen …

First-Quarter Moon by Tom Chitson

Winter’s Moon by Jessica Caterson

In the category Our Solar System was this highly commended photo of Crater Petavius by George Tarsoudis from Greece:

and the Earth and Space category had this highly commended photo from Andrew Steele from the UK entitled “Red Moon rising over Oxford.” Apparently he had to get a farmer’s permission to set up in his field to take this shot. Well worth it!

high res version here.

The People & Space runner up was the whimsical “Hunting Moon” by Jean-Baptiste Feldmann from France. Corny maybe – but nicely done.

You can look at all the photos and read lots more about them and their photographers on the Astronomy Photographer of the Year website. And take a look at the overall winner – it’s stunning – and features two very different moons.

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Jules is a volunteer moderator for the Moon Zoo forum