The winner of this year’s ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year Awards, organized by Royal Observatory Greenwich, is The Andromeda Core, a photograph by Weitang Liang, Qi Yang and Chuhong Yu.
This photograph shows the core of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) in exceptional detail, captured with a telescope with a long focal length. The photographers took advantage of the excellent observing conditions at AstroCamp Observatory in Nerpio, Spain, focusing on revealing the complex structure of the galaxy’s central region and the surrounding stellar population.
The photograph was part of the exhibition featuring the winners in the other categories, which opened at the National Maritime Museum in London on Friday, September 12, 2025.
The ZWO Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year Award was won by Daniele Borsari for his photograph Orion, the Horsehead and the Flame in H-Alpha.
Greg Brown, a judge and astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, noted that “choosing black and white over vivid colors and focusing purely on the shapes and contours of the nebulae was a bold decision that paid off.”
A special attraction in this year’s exhibition was a photograph by NASA astronaut Don Pettit. Earth From Orbit was created during ISS Expedition 72. It is one of many star-field time exposures taken from the International Space Station (ISS) using a homemade sidereal star tracker.
The tracker, which rotates once every ninety minutes, compensates for the attitude movement of the orbiting ISS, allowing distant stars to be photographed as fixed points while Earth continues to rotate below—something that was previously impossible in orbital photography. Pettit returned to Earth in mid-April 2025 after a seven-month mission.
The other winning photographs include The Trace of Refraction by Marcella Giulia Pace, which beautifully captures atmospheric refraction; Comet 12P/Pons–Brooks Taking a Final Bow by Dan Bartlett and Crown of Light by Kavan Chay, which shows a spectacular aurora.
In the Annie Maunder Open Category, the jury awarded the winning prize to Fourth Dimension by Leonardo Di Maggio. This image is based on data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and a photograph Di Maggio took of the inside of a meteorite.
The Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition is organized by Royal Observatory Greenwich.
See also Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2024.
