Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 shortlist | Hacker News Reader

Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 shortlist

rmg.co.uk

253 pointsspeckx42 comments

This is the kind of discovery that I love to see on HN. Regardless of who wins the competition, we all win by getting to see all of the entries.

Absolutely gorgeous shots. Made my day.

It’s also lovely to see the exhibition IRL when it comes, if you’re lucky enough.

When I saw it, there were narratives about the people behind the shots which made it extra special.

> Absolutely gorgeous shots

Yes, but these days I have to wonder whether AI was involved, and I hate having that thought because of the massive time, expertise, equipment, and luck that it takes for the real photos to be created.

Hello, astrophotographer here.

The unique thing about astrophotography is that the subject that we are imaging is (relatively speaking) static. Any slight deviation, even the smallest detail, that is not structurally accurate is PAINFULLY obvious.

As an aside, we do use traditional neural networks for certain processing steps. Deconvolution and noise reduction are very common. However, these are only helping in correcting errors caused by viewing conditions. They are not the "imaginative" AI that you are dreading.

I had a feeling something like this was true, thank you for confirming it!

I would actually be more worried about a knowledgeable human engaging in clever Photoshop alterations, or pasting different images together. Is this an issue in astrophotography? Are there ways to easily detect this?

There is a category called "Annie Maunder Open Category", which allows for creative use of generative AI, as long as it is declared, otherwise it is banned. You have to take that slightly with a pinch of salt though, as many of the images don't represent what could be seen with the naked eye. It could be as simple as a wide spectrum sensor (which I don't think anyone could claim is AI) through to alignment of many 100s of images (for which the algorithms in use may have been considered AI a decade or 2 ago).

> Into the Past by Jim Hildreth

The area in this photo -- the Caineville Mesa, Factory Butte, "Long Dong Silver" (I'm not aware of a more polite name) -- is some of the strangest land in America. It really is that lunar blue gray. The Temples of the Sun and Moon (enormous natural sandcastles) are also nearby, and are similarly eerie in the evening.

The closest I've ever felt to being in space. Recommend!

Agree. Found his site, but that shot’s not listed: https://www.hildreth-photographer.com/portfolio.html?folio=F...

Seems their IG has some of these, including the shot from the article: https://www.instagram.com/tripodtales/p/C8hRS0ctzCp/

Factory Butte: https://www.instagram.com/tripodtales/p/C6gg-wpS-tr/

"Long Dong Silver": https://www.instagram.com/tripodtales/p/C-yLCskOGiC/

Nice images. I personally prefer more of Space and less of Earth in astro.

How did they do solar eruption? Must be some filters as Sun doesn't look like this to naked eye. I mean this image:

https://www.rmg.co.uk/sites/default/files/styles/large/publi...

I believe it's an H-alpha filter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen-alpha

I get an immense amount of pride when I see anything that the Royal Museum Greenwich do because not only is it very local to me but they have such a great way of balancing the history of maritime/meridian with modern services and facilities.

If you’re coming to London please spend a day in Greenwich, you won’t regret it, take in the museums, the small markets, the observatory, stroll round the park, grab a photo of the best view in London (imo) https://www.rmg.co.uk/royal-observatory/attractions/enjoy-be... - then take a walk along the Thames, once you’re done you can hop on an Uber boat and head into central London.

Norwegian here. Not a young one. Ive seen my share of the northern lights and Ive also seen a lot of photos of it. The photos are attractive, but they are never like seen by the photographer with the naked eye.

I blame that dark/night photography is an impossible task. The tricks like long exposure, ISO boost and noise cleanup, saturation, hdr or whatever you throw at it, just wont be like your eyes. Photographers gets carried away in post and boost too much, and I understand why.

Northern lights - are awesome. I encourage you to see it if you havent. Go this winter! And take photos and you’ll know what I meen. The colors wont pop like these popular photos, but standing outside on a freezing winter night holding back your frost breath from blocking the view of the green lights moving like firely beams of across the sky. Hopefully you’re somewhere quiet with no light pollution. There is nothing like it - watching the reflections of the armor of the valkyrene as they march on valhal

I'm all for managing people's expectations, but I'm just not agreeing with your conclusion. Human vision is only capable of registering such a small piece of the spectrum that is there. Just because human eyeballs cannot perceive the information does not mean it is not there. This is true of pretty much any astronomy photographs, and that is why people do it. When you look at the milky way, you don't see all of the colors with your naked eye. It doesn't mean they are not there though. Looking at Pleiades, you just see a group of stars, but long exposures reveal all of the incredible nebulosity around them. Looking at the Andromeda galaxy with the naked eye is meh at best, and only truly becomes awe inspiring with long exposure to start to reveal the detail in the spiral arms. Looking at any deep sky object even with a telescope with naked eye is just never going to allow us to see what is truly there.

Boosting colors/saturation that is already there is no different from what most people do with images on their phones. I also have no issues when people use a SII or H-alpha filters and give them a false color.

I like this interpretation, because my experience seeing the northern lights was similar to OC's. I had such high expectations from photos, and then I saw them and was somewhat underwhelmed. My friends are photographers and they took vibrant photos, but since then it has felt 'fake' somehow.

But your framing it as what is actually going on, just with better sensors than our eyes have, makes me appreciate the art more.

More so than just the colors, capturing moving northern lights at night invariably means capturing an aggregation over a long time. That isn’t just capturing something we can’t natively parse, but aggregating data into something new.

Think someone who only ever saw waterfalls in long-time exposure shots, these frozen, milky streams that look nothing like actual water, while still being pretty to look at. Would you say that person has an understanding of what a waterfall actually looks like? No. But do they see something that is there, but others wouldn’t be able to sense in reality? Also no, as long as we use a subjective experience of time as the baseline.

Capturing motion with timelapse and/or long exposure again is just a way of showing us things that we cannot “capture” on our own. We know the sky moves, we know the auroras change shape, intensity, colors, but on a timescale slower than our perception can handle. Capturing that through a camera just proves that, and is not making things up.

Your premise is just too out there. Someone only ever having seen long exposure of a waterfall is just so preposterous, and is more guilty of making shit up than the GP’s concern over faking imagery by pushing contrast/saturation in images. Yours is just totally made up nonsense trying to make a point while the other is just enhancing real data.

It was an analogy. Most people have only ever seen northern lights in Timelapse shots, and thus have no clue how the real thing differs. Capturing auroras in a photo creates a visualisation of their movement in the sky, and not an accurate representation of what the phenomenon looks like.

But it does look like that. You just don't have the patience to and persistence of vision to see it. You keep making it sound like the camera is making up the image. It's not. It's what is there. The auroras are not static like you are making it out to be. None of this photography is showing unnatural imagery. Why is this confusing?

I believe you and the parent are arguing from two different axis.

You seem to be arguing from a perspective that photography is an opportunity to use technology to show humans what's impossible to see, be it because our eyes don't register the low light (thus needing long exposures or composites), or because we experience time differently than a long exposure photograph shows it.

Meanwhile, the parent is arguing from the perspective that photography should reflect only what our eyeballs can see, without embellishing (or at least as much). Capturing the moment, as it were.

You can both be right, and (I would argue) are. There's room for both (and many more) perspectives in art.

If we only ever “saw” the universe through naked eye observation, we’d “know” a lot less about our universe. Creating waveforms or spectrographs of sound would be similar since humans can’t see sound, should we never be allowed to use those. We can’t see x-rays, so should doctors just have to guess at where your bones are broken?

The fact that humans can over come their limited abilities from their natural senses to be able to experience real world in wider gamuts is a very cool thing. These types of astro images are real world data. It’s not some genAI made up from thin air. People are not rendering things in some 3d software and passing it off as real, or making obviously impossible comps. These are just presenting data that exists that we can’t “see” without help.

Again, I’m all for managing expectations. Every time I let someone look through my telescope, I remind them it is not going to be what they’ve seen from Hubble or anything else online.

> We can’t see x-rays, so should doctors just have to guess at where your bones are broken?

Hey if I wanted to see strawmen, I'd watch The Wizard of Oz instead of trying to have this conversation.

Actually, I'm unsure why you're arguing with me. I literally said you were both right. Unless your stance is that GP's definition of art is incorrect? If so, that's a far more slippery slope than I wish to go down and I bid ye adieu.

I caught them when hitch-hiking from Alaska down to the lower-48 when I was 20 or so. I was also partly sleep deprived but the experience has haunted my dreams since.

Frequently after I would have dreams where wild displays of light (sometimes nebulae) covering the entire night sky, hanging over me — making me feel so small compared to the universe.

I've told my daughters to travel where they have to so that they see them at least once in their lifetime. And I mean the full on blazing in the night sky: crossfading, the colors....

I think I might rank them higher than seeing a full eclipse.

Some absolutely stunning shots here, wow! Photos like this inspire me. The compositions with the huge moon rising behind the landscape are particularly impressive. You need a huge lens to get that kind of perspective, and atmospheric effects and camera shake become more pronounced. The other photos of the night sky impress me less honestly because they are almost always composited (i.e. the Milky Way doesn't actually look like that).

I’d like to see a nice photo of M31 with something in the foreground. It would have to be a composite image, but getting the relative sizes and positions right.

NASA guide to astro photography with smartphones:

https://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/SMBooks/AstrophotographyV1.p...

The one of M33 (Triangulum Galaxy) really blew me away, so many nebulae!

Shanghai blood moon reminded me of Blade Runner. Who knew that a 1982 imagination of LA Chinatown would look so similar to Shanghai in fool Moon.

I know it's partly because of the color pallette, but still

Wow, these are gorgeous. Thanks for sharing!

> Gateway to the Galaxy by Yujie Zhang

Are the "geometric buildings" real or just something she put up for the picture?

I pasted the image into ChatGPT and while I can't find the place described on Google Maps, the picture is clearly of the same place. They're more of a sculpture than a set of buildings.

https://subsites.chinadaily.com.cn/ezhejiang/lishui/2025-01/...

Aren’t images like the one with Saturn basically just different pictures photoshopped together?

Amazing shots. 500,000-km Solar Prominence Eruption, in particular, was amazing!

I can't look at this without asking myself "how many of these are completely generated"?

Thanks for destroying trust, AI researchers and companies. On top of everything else.

I'm not aware of any photograph of this sort that would fool an astronomer. The times and dates wouldn't work if it was faked.

They are highly processed and often stacked but I see nothing there that looks fake.

The competition requires submission of raw files and detailed processing information, making it one of the more rigorous contests for verifying authentic astrophotography.

If you were trusting photos to be pictures of the real world before AI then you should never have had that trust in the first place. You should thank AI companies for opening your eyes to what was already fooling you.

Even if they are real, does it really matter when the camera is doing superhuman work with things like a 27 km zoomed in picture of a building or composite of 300 separate exposures. If you get to combine exposures, why not just expose a moon separately from a building and combine them in the computer?

The amount of compression that was applied to these photo is downright criminal.

You are free to visit the actual exhibition to see the images without compression.

https://www.rmg.co.uk/whats-on/astronomy-photographer-year/e...

Is there any place for me to pay to download one of these for personal use as a desktop wallpaper?

Oh its not coldplay concert photos

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