Northern Hemisphere 2021 Winners

At last the waiting is over! It’s been another amazing nPAE Northern Hemisphere astrophotography competition and it’s with great fanfare we announce the winners from the 16 finalists. It was superb to see lunar and solar entries this time and there was a stunning collection of talent, tenacity and hardware on display.

The public opinion vote attracted 13,419 votes and received a huge response in Puerto Rico. Thanks Nelson! We sent Nelson an nPAE gift pack for winning the public vote by a light year. We also made an appearance on the Hungarian news channel Balatontelevizio!

We’d like to thank all the competitors for entering. They were all amazing images and we thoroughly enjoyed deciding who was going to get the prizes.

It wasn’t an easy choice, but are here are the judges’ final decisions….

In 3rd place, winning a £50 ($69) nPAE voucher, is Mineral Moon by James from the United Kingdom.

Taken with a Skymax Pro180 telescope and ZWOASI224MC camera and processed in Autostakkert and Photoshop to reveal amazing crater detail. Zooming in on the Plato crater the topography of the rim is revealed in the shadow.

In 2nd place, and the winner of the nPAE Theia astro imaging filter changer, is Comet Atlas in Auriga by Pavel from Mexico.

With a very hefty equipment stack of a Takahashi FS60 (with focal reducer resulting in F4 255mm), Atik 460ex mono, StarlightXpress FilterWheel + OAG (with Altair GPcam2 as guiding cam), Baader Planetarium narrowband filters all sat upon an Orion Atlas EQ-G mount the nebulas of Auriga with comet Atlas are shown in SHO palette from 47 hours of exposure time!

And the 1st place winner collecting £200 ($276) and becoming the nPAE Northern Hemisphere Astrophotography Champion 2021! Is……………… Andromeda by Lorand from Hungary.

Taken with a Celestron 11″ RASA a SkyWatcher EQ-6 mount and a QHY 247C camera it is a combination of LRGB and Ha images processed in RegiStar and Photoshop. The small scale of the image here doesn’t really do it justice. The large format can be zoomed in on to reveal incredible details like the nebula features in NGC206 and the dust belt surrounding the galactic core.

Thank you again to all those who entered making this competition possible. We look forward to everyone entering again next year. Remember the Sun, Moon and planets are all objects in the sky! The nPAE astrophotography competition next moves to the Southern Hemisphere. The winner of which will be able to challenge Lorand and Boris, the reigning champion, for the title of nPAE World Champion Astrophotographer 2021 in a public vote.

The Southern Hemisphere stage runs from 1st June to 31st August.