Landscape astro photographer, Tom Rae, has won the Royal Museums Greenwich Skyscapes Astronomy Photographer of the Year for a second time.
His winning picture this year is 'The Ridge' taken at Aoraki Mount Cook is comprised of 62 individual photos stitched together to create a panoramic view.
Rae, who is based in Canterbury, scoped out the potential image by taking preparatory shots with his phone, he says.
“I climbed up this ridge line and I took some photos on my phone and then I thought yep, this is one that I'll have to come back for when the Milky Way aligns, which was a year from that date.”
The winning image:
The article talks a bit about it. It's a composite image, and he uses special lenses that capture non-visible light.
And when it's a composite image, you can capture the appropriate amount of light for each part of the photo. A single photo needs to compromise, think of how a photo of the moon never has stars in it, because if the exposure is long enough to pick up starlight then the moon is far too bright. The winning photo here is 60 photos stitched together, so each part of the final image is just right.
I think you can argue something like this winning image is as much photoshop as it is photograph, but it's still really cool.