The 2025 Astronomy Photographer of the Year People's Choice Award has been won by Benjamin Barakat's 'Dragon Tree Trails', a breathtaking image of a lone Dragon's Blood tree surrounded by star trails. This image, captured from Firmihin Forest in Socotra, Yemen, showcases the beauty of the night sky and the apparent movement of stars as Earth rotates. What makes this image particularly fascinating is the technique used to capture the star trails. Barakat took 300 individual exposures and stacked them to create the final image, using underexposure and a low ISO to achieve clean, vibrant trails. This method allowed him to recover shadow details in post-processing without compromising quality. The result is a truly magical scene, one of Barakat's favorite star trail images from around the world.
In second place, Steeve Body's 'The Vela Supernova Remnant' captures a cosmic cloud, or nebula, known as the Vela supernova remnant. This high-resolution image, spanning seven degrees, is one of the deepest and most detailed ever taken of this region. Body used narrowband and color filters to enhance the natural appearance of the glowing gases, revealing faint structures that would otherwise remain hidden. The image was captured from Fisher, South Australia, under some of the darkest skies in the world, visible only from the southern hemisphere.
Third place goes to Peter Greig's 'Raining Down On Dunstanburgh Castle', an aurora display over Embleton Bay in Northumberland, UK. Greig captured this image during an intense solar storm, the most powerful he's ever witnessed in the UK. He chose a unique perspective, moving to the castle's north side and pointing his camera south-east, creating a vertorama to capture the entire scene. This image showcases the raw power of nature and the beauty of the aurora, even with a wide-angle lens.
These images, and the techniques used to capture them, highlight the incredible talent and creativity of astrophotographers. The Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition, run by Royal Museums Greenwich in London, UK, is the biggest astrophotography competition in the world, welcoming hundreds of images from entrants across the globe each year. The People's Choice Award, in particular, allows the public to vote for their favorite images, showcasing the diverse and captivating beauty of the night sky.
