Recently I was browsing Twitter and someone posted that the BBC Sky at Night Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest was taking submissions. It only costs about $13 to enter so I figured why not! Last year was a really fun year for me in terms of astrophotography, so I might as well see what happens!

There are multiple categories, but some of them I clearly have no chance at. I loved all my Mars pictures this year, but there are people with impressively expensive telescopes that simply get better pictures. It’s a pretty depressing part of this hobby sometimes, money will usually win out. The category that most caught my eye was, not surprisingly, “People & Space”.

People and Space is described as “Photographs of the night sky that include people or elements that show the presence or influence of human beings”. This year I’ve photographed multiple geostationary satellite eclipses, the Venesat-1 satellite tumbling out of control, and I took a photo where I digitally removed the stars to reveal satellites. As fun as planetary imaging was in 2021, I was probably the most innovative in my satellite photography.

The contest allows for ten photo submissions for the entry fee, and after looking through all my 2020 photos I settled on five pictures I was most proud of.

1 - Digitally Removed Stars To Reveal Satellites And Space Junk

This is the image I have the most hope for. It’s a unique image that I’ve never seen anyone else attempt before. My only worry with this image is that it’s not very self explanatory, and it’s not the most high resolution image.

2 - Geostationary Satellites

I love this image, it’s very geometric, the colors of the background stars are quite vivid, and the satellites are extremely pronounced. I’m not sure people will like it considering how rough the stars look due to wind and atmospheric effects, but we’ll see.

3 - The ISS

I love this photo of the ISS, it’s my best and by far my favorite. The three dimensional view of the solar panels really makes this stand out as my best ISS image. I’m sure someone will submit one with a ridiculous telescope that gives crazy resolution, but I’m proud of this one.

4 - Venesat-1 Out Of Control

This image is great, but has a lot of drawbacks. If you didn’t know what you were looking at you’d have no idea what this was. The fact that I didn’t rotate my camera level with the motion of the stars limits how much I can rotate this image, and I’m not sure I like how slanted it is. I doubt many people will like it, but no one can say it’s not unique!

5 - My Map of Mars

My map of Mars is comically low resolution to be adding to a photography competition, but I put a lot of work into it and I love it. I’ve seen other people on Twitter with more impressive ones, but I love it so why not. It’s not like I’m paying per picture!

Most of these pictures needed some major revisions to sharpen them up slightly, make them a bit larger, and remove any text in them as it was against the rules. Apparently I’ll find out if any images were short-listed for the competition some time in March.

Fingers crossed!