Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2013
Sunday, December 15th, 2013
The winners have been announced in the Royal Observatory’s astronomy photography competition. More than 1200 photographs of stars, planets, galaxies and other celestial highlights were submitted through Sky at Night Magazine and Flickr.
The Winners
The overall winner, and the winner of the Earth and Space category, was Mark Gee of Australia, with “Guiding Light to the Stars”.
The Deep Space category winner was Adam Block of the USA, with “Celestial Impasto: sh2-239”.
The winner of the category Our Solar System with “Corona Composite of 2012” is Man-To Hui of China.
Three special prizes are also awarded. Mark Gee was the winner of the People and Space category, with “Moon Silhouettes”. László Francsics of Hungary won the Robotic Scope category, with “The Trapezium Cluster and surrounding Nabulae”. The ‘Best Newcomer’ prize, renamed this year “The Sir Patrick Moore Prize for Best Newcomer’ in honour of this well-known broadcaster, lunar observer and former judge of the competition, is Sam Cornwell of the UK, with “Venus Transit, Foxhunter’s Grave, Welsh Highlands”.
The photographs can be seen on the Royal Observatory website.
Exhibition, Book and App
An exhibition of the photographs runs until 23 February 2014, and a hardback book is available, with the shortlisted and winning entries. There is also an app for iPhone and iPad, with 90 images and technical information about them.
Image information:
Cloud Towers above is not one of the exhibition images. It is a NASA image.
In a view from high altitude, height can be a difficult thing to gauge. The highest of clouds can appear to sit on a flat plane, as if they were at the same elevation as the ocean or land surface. In this image, however, texture, shape and shadows lend definition to mushrooming thunderheads over the Indonesian island of Flores. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired this image on the afternoon of Dec. 2, 2013.
The towering clouds are so well defined that it is easy to visualize the rapidly rising air that is fueling them. “This looks like a classic example of island convection that is enhanced by topography,” says NASA scientist Joseph Munchak.
During the day, sunlight heats the land more quickly than it heats the ocean. The warm air over land rises, creating an area of low pressure that pulls in cool air from the ocean. The result is a sea breeze. On this Indonesia island, the sea breeze from the Flores Sea on the north blows inland and clashes with the sea breeze blowing inland from the Savu Sea in the south. When the two breezes meet in the center of Flores, they push the air up. The rising air cools and condenses into a line of clouds.
Sea breeze convection is not the only force at work here. On Flores, cloud formation has help from the shape of the land. A line of tall volcanoes runs down the spine of the island, and their steep slopes also force air to rise. So, moist ocean air blows inland, hits the mountains and volcanoes and rises with the slope. Above the mountains, the rising air meets the rising sea breeze from the other side, and the upward motion is reinforced.
The combination of the two forces pushes air high into the atmosphere, resulting in large towering clouds of the sort that usually produce thunderstorms. In fact, a weather station on Flores reported rain and thunderstorms on December 2. This type of convection is strongest in the early afternoon, says Munchak, just about the time when Aqua MODIS acquired the image. The clouds were just beginning to form when Terra MODIS passed over earlier in the day.
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Image Credit: NASA/Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC Caption: Holli Riebeek