> Gateway to the Galaxy by Yujie Zhang
Are the "geometric buildings" real or just something she put up for the picture?
Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 shortlist
21–30 of 43 posts
Re: Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 shortlist
#22> Gateway to the Galaxy by Yujie Zhang Are the "geometric buildings" real or just something she put up for the picture?
I pasted the image into ChatGPT and while I can't find the place described on Google Maps, the picture is clearly of the same place. They're more of a sculpture than a set of buildings.
https://subsites.chinadaily.com.cn/ezhejiang/lishui/2025-01/...
Re: Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 shortlist
#23Nice images. I personally prefer more of Space and less of Earth in astro.
How did they do solar eruption? Must be some filters as Sun doesn't look like this to naked eye. I mean this image:
https://www.rmg.co.uk/sites/default/files/styles/large/publi...
Re: Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 shortlist
#24Nice images. I personally prefer more of Space and less of Earth in astro. How did they do solar eruption? Must be some filters as Sun doesn't look like this to naked eye. I mean this image: https://www.rmg.co.uk/sites/default/files/styles/large/publi...
I believe it's an H-alpha filter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen-alpha
Re: Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 shortlist
#25> Into the Past by Jim Hildreth The area in this photo -- the Caineville Mesa, Factory Butte, "Long Dong Silver" (I'm not aware of a more polite name) -- is some of the strangest land in America. It really is that lunar blue gray. The Temples of the Sun and Moon (enormous natural sandcastles) are also nearby, and are similarly eerie in the evening. The closest I've ever felt to being in space. Recommend!
Agree. Found his site, but that shot’s not listed: https://www.hildreth-photographer.com/portfolio.html?folio=F...
Seems their IG has some of these, including the shot from the article: https://www.instagram.com/tripodtales/p/C8hRS0ctzCp/
Factory Butte: https://www.instagram.com/tripodtales/p/C6gg-wpS-tr/
"Long Dong Silver": https://www.instagram.com/tripodtales/p/C-yLCskOGiC/
Re: Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 shortlist
#26Some absolutely stunning shots here, wow! Photos like this inspire me. The compositions with the huge moon rising behind the landscape are particularly impressive. You need a huge lens to get that kind of perspective, and atmospheric effects and camera shake become more pronounced.
The other photos of the night sky impress me less honestly because they are almost always composited (i.e. the Milky Way doesn't actually look like that).
Re: Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 shortlist
#27I’d like to see a nice photo of M31 with something in the foreground. It would have to be a composite image, but getting the relative sizes and positions right.
Re: Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 shortlist
#28Amazing shots. 500,000-km Solar Prominence Eruption, in particular, was amazing!
Re: Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 shortlist
#29I can't look at this without asking myself "how many of these are completely generated"? Thanks for destroying trust, AI researchers and companies. On top of everything else.
If you were trusting photos to be pictures of the real world before AI then you should never have had that trust in the first place. You should thank AI companies for opening your eyes to what was already fooling you.
Even if they are real, does it really matter when the camera is doing superhuman work with things like a 27 km zoomed in picture of a building or composite of 300 separate exposures. If you get to combine exposures, why not just expose a moon separately from a building and combine them in the computer?
Re: Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 shortlist
#30Norwegian here. Not a young one. Ive seen my share of the northern lights and Ive also seen a lot of photos of it. The photos are attractive, but they are never like seen by the photographer with the naked eye. I blame that dark/night photography is an impossible task. The tricks like long exposure, ISO boost and noise cleanup, saturation, hdr or whatever you throw at it, just wont be like your eyes. Photographers ge…
I'm all for managing people's expectations, but I'm just not agreeing with your conclusion. Human vision is only capable of registering such a small piece of the spectrum that is there. Just because human eyeballs cannot perceive the information does not mean it is not there. This is true of pretty much any astronomy photographs, and that is why people do it. When you look at the milky way, you don't see all of the c…
More so than just the colors, capturing moving northern lights at night invariably means capturing an aggregation over a long time. That isn’t just capturing something we can’t natively parse, but aggregating data into something new.
Think someone who only ever saw waterfalls in long-time exposure shots, these frozen, milky streams that look nothing like actual water, while still being pretty to look at. Would you say that person has an understanding of what a waterfall actually looks like? No. But do they see something that is there, but others wouldn’t be able to sense in reality? Also no, as long as we use a subjective experience of time as the baseline.