2026 Astronomy Photographer of the Year Winners Revealed — SkimNews
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- Ali Alobaidly of Kuwait won the overall competition with "The Quiet Predator," an image requiring more than 28 hours of observing to capture the dense Shark nebula — a cloud of dust 650 light years away in the constellation Cepheus that glows blue around a few bright stars.
- Kfir Simon from Israel was named runner-up with "Beyond the Wormhole," a photograph of the center of the Helix nebula roughly 650 light years away in Aquarius, through whose dust and gas extraordinarily distant galaxies can be seen shining.
- Petr Horalek took the Our Moon category prize with "Venusian Pearl on the Moon," a daytime photograph shot in the Czech Republic capturing Venus slipping behind the crescent moon during a relatively rare lunar occultation.
- Peter Ward of Australia earned the Our Sun runner-up slot with "Anatomy of the Chromosphere," which layers hydrogen emissions (shown in red) with calcium emissions (in lilac) to reveal the structure of the sun's chromosphere between its visible surface and corona.
- Julien DeWinter and Landon Boehm were highly commended for their image of Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon), captured from Texas in October 2025 when the comet was about 101 million km from Earth and exhibited two distinct plumes — one of dust and one of electrically charged plasma.
- Stefano Pellegrini won the Skyscapes category with "Botswana Star Trail," a composite built from 340 thirty-second exposures recording star movement above a grove of baobab trees.
- The Royal Observatory Greenwich will exhibit the winning images at the National Maritime Museum in London beginning 18 September.
Why it matters: Organized by the Royal Observatory Greenwich, the annual competition convenes astrophotographers worldwide, and the resulting National Maritime Museum exhibition opening 18 September gives the public access to technically extreme celestial work — Alobaidly's 28-hour exposure and Pellegrini's 340-frame composite — that casual observers could never produce themselves.
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