Contest

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.

This week’s image is the winning entry in the ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2026 contest at the Royal Museums Greenwich. The photo of the Shark Nebula is titled “The Quiet Predator,” and it was submitted by Ali Alobaidly.

Here is how Ali Alobaidly describes his photo:

 The Shark Nebula (LDN 1235) prowls 650 light years away in the constellation Cepheus, its silhouette carved not from flesh and teeth, but from interstellar dust dense enough to block starlight.

This predator drifts silently through space, camouflaged against the faint glow of the background stars, lit only by nearby blue-coloured reflection nebulae.

Unlike its oceanic cousins, the Shark Nebula doesn’t bite, but it does photobomb astrophotographers with a molecular cloud big enough to make Earth look like a speck of plankton.

You can see the other winning and shortlisted images at the main site.

This week’s image is from another finalist in the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s annual ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. The photo is labeled “Cosmic Neighbours: Beauty and the Beast” by photographers Yijing Zhu and Xinghan Yang. It was taken in Ürümqi, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China.

Here is a description of the photo from the photographers:

This image captures a dramatic cosmic pairing: the serene elegance of Bode’s Galaxy (M81, left) alongside the chaotic violence of the Cigar Galaxy (M82, right). Located about 12 million light years from Earth, these two neighbours are locked in a gravitational dance that has shaped their destinies profoundly. M81 retains its perfect grand design spiral form, a picture of galactic grace.  

In stark contrast, M82 is a starburst galaxy, reeling from a close encounter with its larger companion. This gravitational disturbance has triggered a furious burst of star formation at its core, which blasts into space spectacular red filaments of superheated hydrogen gas that are clearly visible in this deep exposure.