Astronomy Photos 2013

Today the Royal Observatory Greenwich in London opened its annual exhibition of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition (CLICK; warning: you may find this is a very slow loader). My glorified thumbnail of the overall winner doesn't do it justice: Mark Gee's photo Guiding Light to the Stars (8 June 2013). What looks like a thundercloud is actually the Milky Way, taken from the coast of the North Island of New Zealand. The bright light is the Cape Palliser Lighthouse. Mark says, "I took a wide panorama made up of 20 individual images to get this shot. Stitching the images together was a challenge but the result was worth it!" True. CLICK for a BBC slide show produced by Paul Kerley, not one of his best: poorly chosen music and an irritating voiceover by a self-important female judge.