Astronomy Photo Contest Finalists Will Take Your Breath Away

This photo, one of the finalists in the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition, shows a auroral corona behind a wind turbine and was taken in northern Finland.

Marvel at the Northern Lights shining over the Icelandic mountain Vestrahorn.

Photographer Carl Gallagher captured this image of the Aurora Borealis over the wreck of the Gardur in Iceland. The photographer was on a nine-day road trip.

The Northern Lights are seen reflected in a lake in Alberta, Canada.

This photo shows Messier 78, a reflection nebula near Orion.

The Mingantu Astronomical Observatory in Inner Mongolia is shown silhouetted against the night sky.

NGC 5426 and NGC 5427 are two spiral galaxies known collectively as Arp 271.

The Southern Pinwheel Galaxy was first observed on Feb. 23, 1752, and this finalist photo was taken exactly 270 years later.

This pair of interacting galaxies are located in the southern constellation of Eridanus, which means "The River."

The photographer created a photo montage of Earth using images from the Suomi NPP satellite. 

This image depicts the busy surface and coronal activity of the sun.

This lunar surface contains hidden colors within the soil, caused by different minerals. Here, the colors have been enhanced and inverted.

This composite of images of the lunar south pole was created on two different dates.

Here, you can see the craters and mountains at the lunar south pole.

Clouds of hydrogen gas give way as the magnetic field lines of the sun snap and clash together.

A partial eclipse of the sun as seen from the Veneto region of Italy.

The photographer selectively filtered out all wavelengths of light except a narrow red band (known as the H-alphaline) to reveal an active region of change of the sun.

Comet Leonard was discovered on Jan. 3, 2021, by G.J. Leonard.

Saturn's moons are distributed almost symmetrically around the planet, balancing the composition of this photograph. 

Jupiter is shown with three of its largest moons.

This finalist captures people enjoying the full harvest moon rising behind Glastonbury Tor in the UK.

National Highway 219, the highest national highway in the world, snakes through the foreground. The photo was taken in Shannan, Tibet, China.

This finalist photo highlights the moon high above the mountains and iconic skyline of Los Angeles.

Breathtaking cherry trees line the Funakawa River in Japan, while only a little moonlight breaks through the sky.

The Milky Way pierces through the night sky above stacked stones on the beach at St. Agnes in the Isles of Scilly in the UK.

This photo is actually a stacked shot of 15 exposures, taken at Shiroka Polyana Dam in Bulgaria.

The Milky Way is shown above the southern Oregon coast.

The Milky Way rises above the research pier of the Marine Research Institute in Japan.

The Milky Way is shown over the Three Dollar Bridge in Montana.

Stars circle around Polaris in this stack of 33 four-minute exposures.

The Milky Way mirrors the water at the nature reserve at Chidiya Tapu in India's Andaman Islands.

A deep view of the Crescent Nebula in Cygnus.

This image, taken from Australia, captures a region on the edge of the constellation Vela.

The main object in this image is a nebula cataloged as RCW 53c and seldom captured by photographers.

This image shows the nebula IC 1848 and its core, IC 1871.

Growing light pollution in cities is one of the major challenges faced by astrophotographers. Zezhen Zhou used narrow bandpass filters to capture this image of NGC 6979 (Pickering's Triangle) in Shaoxing, China.