Each year, a jury meets the Greenwich Observatory, United Kingdom, to reward the most beautiful photos of the sky taken by astrophotography around the world. Here are the first prizes for each of the nine categories and the special price.

1. Grand prize: the molecular cloud Rho Ophiuchi

Here is a splendid photo of the complex Rho Ophiuchi taken in the limpid sky of Namibia, in August 2016. This colorful cloud is one of the regions of star formation closest to our solar system. Remote from some 460 light-years, it extends to about 14 light-years within Ophiuchus, the thirteenth zodiac constellation.

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2. Category "polar auroras "

On the lookout on the shore, in the south of Iceland, by a night of October 2016, the Photographer Mikkel Beiter recounts: "Suddenly, of clouds have emerged from the nearby mountains, floating on the sea while the Aurore boréale was beginning to explode mightily. All this has created a real ghostly scene! "

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3. Category "galaxies": Messier 63

nicknamed the galaxy of sunflower (Sunflower Galaxy), Messier 63 or, for short, M63, is approximately 26 million light-years from Earth. Oleg Bryzgalov explains that he visited in one of the places more dark of Europe to photograph this galaxy and the streaks of stars and gas which surround it.

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4. Category "our natural satellite, the Moon"

the photo below was taken from the ground, in Budapest, Hungary. Yet, we have the impression of being aboard a small spacecraft in approach of the Moon. Under our eyes, the radiating crater Tycho (well visible in binoculars or a telescope). The impact is relatively recent in the geological scale (a little more than 100 million years). The ejecta of dust are well visible hundreds of thousands of kilometers to the Round, hand and on the other the crater of 86 km in diameter and some 4.8 km depth.

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5. Category "our star, the Sun "

This photo of the sun has not been taken at any time... It was on May 9, 2016. This day, some landowners could see the smallest planet of the solar system, Mercury, pass in front of their star. Look well. One sees his silhouette round, a little below the equator of the sun. The bright spots correspond to the active regions of the sun.

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6. Category "Men and Space"

we are here at the frontiers of the world, in the face of the infinite spaces. The photographer Yuri Zvezdny is standing in this amazing landscape, at the foot of the glacier Piedras Blancas, in the Los Glaciares National Park, in Argentina. Above him, the southern night and the center of the Milky Way: billions of other suns, each, or almost, surrounded by planets...

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7. Category "planets, comets and asteroids"

The size changes and phase of Venus are pictured here during six months. View of the Earth, the hottest planet in the Solar System, located between us and the sun, gradually changes from Phase. The phenomenon can significantly increase its shine in the sky of the dusk or dawn (this depends on the periods), as well as its apparent size at the discretion of its position relative to the earth. All the photos to the left, until the croissants, have been taken with filters infrared.

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8. Category "celestial Landscapes"

Here is a wonderful landscape that one has the impression to see through a window... perhaps it is aboard a spacecraft? We are in one of the arms of the Milky Way? Travel us toward the center of the galaxy? No, we are always on Earth.

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9. Special price youth

aged 13, the British Olivia Williamson has received the first prize of this portrait of Saturn realized in the United Arab Emirates on 27 May 2016. "The conditions were the best that I had views from a certain time and Saturn seemed to have more details that I had never seen, said the young astrophotographer. I have made the trip with my father until the desert, near Al Khanzna, in order to escape the light pollution of the city".

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10. Special price: the nebula of the Cone

The winner Jason Green invites us through this composite image to an immersion in the nebula of the cone, located at 2,600 light years from the earth, within the constellation of the unicorn. The details have delighted the jury which awarded its special price to this new-Come in astrophotography.

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