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.
Jules is a volunteer moderator for the Moon Zoo forum
International Observe the Moon Night Challenges
To celebrate the very first International Observe the Moon Night on 18 September 2010 Moon Zoo set 2 challenges. Zookeeper Rob blogged about one challenge which involved the launch of the Moonometer.TM Between September 15th and 19th the Moon Zoo community were challenged to classify 20,000 images, a vast area of the Moon equivalent to 2 Chicagos.
This proved to be easy and we blasted through the target within 48 hours! The stakes were upped to 40,000 images (or 40 Manhattans.) Again the Moon Zooites rose to the challenge and 24 hours later the second target was smashed and a third and final target of 60,000 images was set (that’s equivalent to 10,596 Disneylands!) 24 hours and 60,000 images later the Moon Zoo Community had reason to be proud.
We celebrated International Observe the Moon Night in style – inside, warm and cosy looking at images of the Moon in unprecedented detail while (for some of us, at least) the clouds descended, the winds howled and the rain fell preventing any real time observations.
And the good news is that the MoonometerTM is here to stay!
The second challenge was a photographic one. Not the easiest challenge given the inclement weather in some areas but nevertheless we rose to the challenge and this is the result – a mixture of daytime, night time, arty and abstract Moons:
There’s a couple of mine in there and big thanks go to fellow contributors PaddyD, Tom128, astrostu, Geoff and Caro (of Moon Gallery fame).
Caro based her 2 abstracts on the Ina feature.
We now have a permanent lunar imaging thread on the forum to complement the Moon Gallery.
Thanks everyone! 
Jules is a volunteer moderator for the Moon Zoo Forum.
Moon Zoo 