The astonishing diversity of the cosmos is on display in the 2026 Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition, organised by the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London. From our own solar system to distant nebulae, these images showcase the many wonders we can observe from the ground on Earth.
The overall winner (above), The Quiet Predator, was taken by Ali Alobaidly in Kuwait. It shows a dense nebula 650 light years away, in the constellation Cepheus. This cloud of dust, called the Shark nebula, contains a few bright stars that make their surroundings glow blue. The nebula is so dark and distant that it took Alobaidly more than 28 hours of observing to create this image.
The runner-up in the competition (above) is Beyond the Wormhole, taken by Kfir Simon in Israel. While the image may evoke a hole in space-time, it actually depicts the centre of the Helix nebula, which is about 650 light years away in the constellation Aquarius. Beyond the central star that formed the nebula when it shed its outer layers thousands of years ago, extraordinarily distant galaxies shine through the dust and gas.
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In the Our Moon category, Venusian Pearl on the Moon (above) took the prize. Petr Horalek took this photograph in the Czech Republic as the moon passed in front of Venus in the middle of the day. He captured this relatively rare event, called an occultation, just as Venus slipped behind the crescent moon.
The runner-up in the Our Sun section is, unsurprisingly, an image of the sun. However, Anatomy of the Chromosphere (above), captured by Peter Ward in Australia, isn’t a simple photograph. It represents two different wavelengths of light, one of which captures emission from hydrogen along the sun’s edges, represented in red, while the other shows emission from calcium, shown in lilac. Together, they reveal the structure of the sun’s chromosphere, which is the layer just above its visible surface, but below its corona.
Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) jets across the sky in this highly commended image by Julien DeWinter and Landon Boehm, taken from Texas. When it was captured, in October 2025, the comet was almost at its closest point to the sun, about 101 million kilometres from Earth. That proximity to the sun caused remarkable activity on the comet, creating two long plumes, one made of dust and the other of electrically charged plasma.
With a more earthly setting, the winner of the Skyscapes category is Botswana Star Trail, taken by Stefano Pellegrini. It captures the movement of stars above a grove of baobab trees over the course of 340 camera exposures, each lasting 30 seconds.
The winning images from the competition will be exhibited at the National Maritime Museum in London from 18 September.
