This week’s image is the winning entry from Astronomy magazine’s 2026 Astrophotography Contest. The winning image is titled “The Dementors of Cepheus,” captured by Julien De Winter, Landon Boehm, and Brian Diaz. It was one of about 1,400 entries in the contest.
The magazine defines the image in this way:
A pair of shadowy, wraithlike figures weave their way through a grand tapestry of stellar life and death in our grand-prize-winning image. The imagers refer to them as the “Dementors of Cepheus” — a reference to the wardens of the prison Azkaban in the Harry Potter series. Here, they guard not convicts, but a corpse: The filaments of gas in the center of the frame are the remnants of a supernova, cataloged as SNR G110.3+11.3, that blew apart a massive star.
The supernova is approximately 1,300 light-years away in the constellation Cepheus.
You can read more about this winning image as well as the winners in other categories at the magazine’s gallery site.
