People's Choice Award 2021

Winner: Alien Throne by Marcin Zajac

An other-worldly rock spire (also known as a ‘hoodoo’) rises out of the badlands forming a perfect foreground to the Milky Way galaxy above.

“I am honoured to have my image named the winner," photographer Marcin Zajac says. "The quality of submissions was amazing and I am grateful that Alien Throne was so well received by astrophotography fans around the world.”

The photograph was taken in the Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah Wilderness in the San Juan Basin in New Mexico, one of most remote areas of the United States that Marcin has ever visited.

"The nearest town is 50 miles away, and the rough and occasionally sandy road to get there stress-tested my car," he says. "However, I was rewarded with an opportunity to camp under a dark and beautiful sky, and the only sound breaking the silence at night were coyotes howling in the distance."

Third place: Retrograde Mars And Uranus by Tunç Tezel

Tunç says, "2020 was a good year for observing Mars, with the red planet coming to a perihelic opposition on 13 October and the apparent magnitude being as bright as -2.6. While Mars was putting on a show in the constellation of Pisces, Uranus was also visible in the constellation of Aries performing a much slower retrograde motion of its own. I photographed the motions of both planets on 38 different nights."