For any budding photographers out there, the Royal Museums Greenwich has announced that its Astronomy Photographer Of The Year 2015 competition is now open to entries. It’s one of London’s youngest photography prizes, but it’s also one of its most impressive, showcasing the work of young and adult astrophotographers as they capture breathtaking imagery of the night sky and the twinkling flashes of existence beyond the reaches of our solar system.
If you want to get in on the finger clicking nocturnal action, you’ve got until 12 midnight on the 16th April 2015 to get your shots taken and submit your entry to be in with a chance of picking up the £2500 winners prize. For those of you that are more interested in seeing astronomical photographs than taking them yourself, the exhibition will be back up and running again at the National Maritime Museum from around mid September 2015.
To enter the adult competition, you’ll need a Flickr account, so if you haven’t got one then just head over to https://www.flickr.com/ to set up an account and you’ll be good to go. Then it’s just a case of uploading your shots to your account and setting them to your public facing account, so that anyone can view them, but, more importantly, so that the judges can see them.
Once you’ve got this all set up, you can then use the Entry Form on the Museum’s website to sign into your account and select up to five of your best pictures to submit to be entered into the competition. As well as the main prize, there are also a number of category winner, runner-up and highly commended prizes to be in the running for, as well as the two special prizes; The Sir Patrick Moore Prize for Best Newcomer and best Robotic Scope photograph, both of which have a prize of £350 each.
The categories that are included in the 2015 competition and exhibition are Aurorae, Skyscapes, People and Space, Our Sun, Our Moon; Planets, Comets and Asteroids; Stars and Nebulae; and Galaxies. Prizes for each of these range from £125 and £250 for the highly commended images, £250 and £500 for the runners-up and £500-£1,000 for the winners in each category, so there’s a lot of opportunities to actually win a little money to reinvest in your astrological photography, as well as giving you a chance to pick up a prestigious prize.
As well as the adult competition, there is also a junior prize to enter for young photographers, which doesn’t require a Flickr account to enter. If you’re aged fifteen or under, just fill in the Entry Form to submit up to 5 images, as long as they were taken after the 1st January 2014, and you can be in with a chance of taking either the £500 winners prize, the £250 runners up prize or the £125 highly commended prize. The winning entry will also be eligible to win the main prize too.
For any potential astronomical photographers out there that want to learn the skills needed to be in with a chance of taking one of the prizes, you can find out more about how to take astronomical photographs with the competition’s guide. You can also see some pretty cool images below to get some inspiration for your own astrophotography efforts.
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Aurora over a Glacier Lagoon by James Woodend, UK.
Hybrid Solar Eclipse 2 by Eugen Kamenew, Germany.
Coastal Stairways by Chris Murphy, New Zealand.
