Enjoy a feast of eye-candy in the form of the spectacular winning entries to this year’s Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. Once again, some fantastic astro photos were revealed at the award ceremony on Friday at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, in London.

Thousands of amateur and professional photographers competed for the much-prized title of Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year, and this year it went to Chinese photographer Yu Jun, who captured an unusual sequence of images showing the phenomenon of Baily’s Beads during the total eclipse of the Sun that occurred on 9 March, 2016. (You can also see last year’s winning entries in a previous post.)

Baily’s Beads are the brilliant beads of sunlight that shine through valleys on the Moon’s limb during the initial and final stages of the total phase of a solar eclipse. Yu Jun captured their changing appearance throughout March’s eclipse with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II camera, and then stacked them together to produce a memorable image. Also visible are pinkish-red prominences on the Sun. The image won the Our Sun category and was overall winner.

The Royal Observatory’s Public Astronomer, Dr Marek Kukula, who was one of the judges, said: “This is such a visually striking image, with its succession of fiery arcs all perfectly balanced around the pitch black circle of totality. It’s even more impressive when you realise what it shows: the progress of a solar eclipse, all compressed into a single frame with consummate skill and precision. A tremendous achievement that pushes the boundaries of what modern astrophotography can achieve.”

The display of northern lights that won the Aurorae category of astro photos happened on the evening of the total solar eclipse in 20 March 2015, and was witnessed from near Longyearbyen in Spitsbergen. The photo was taken by György Soponyai, from Hungary, when the Sun was shining 9° below the horizon, meaning it was evening nautical twilight on the shore of Greenland Sea. The Adventtoppen Mountain, standing at 2,579ft tall, makes a towering backdrop.

Messier 94 is a spiral galaxy lying 16 million light-years away. Noted for its two-ringed structure, the centre of its structure includes shimmering pinks of the inner ring that reveal hectic star-forming activity, leading to its sometimes being referred to as a starburst ring. The photographer has also captured the often unseen galactic halo of M94 made up of stars, hot gases and dark matter, from his site, the Castor Sirene Observatory, at Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, France.

The competition judges called this winning entry in the Our Moon category an incredibly close-up view of the roughhewn lunar landscape littered with craters and craterlets largely forged by impacts from meteors and asteroids. It was taken by Jordi Delpeix Borrell from L’Ametlla del Vallès, Barcelona, Spain.

Star trails depicting the movement of the Earth, gently arc over the towering buildings peppered with neon signs and light pipes in the bustling Quarry Bay of Hong Kong. The light pollution in Hong Kong means that only a few stars are generally visible in the night sky, but this photograph, by Wing Ka Ho, shows that despite this you can still engage in some stargazing wherever you are in the world. It won the People and Space category.

Damian Peach is justly famous around the world for his remarkable planetary images which show far more detail than was possible with the world’s largest telescopes only a quarter of a century ago. He travelled to Marley Vale, Barbados, from where Saturn was high in the sky, to take his image of the second largest planet on 18 March 2016. Winner of the Planets, Comets and Asteroids category, it clearly depicts the planet’s famed rings in great detail with striking contrast between each of them. Storms are visible across the face of the planet, as well as the peculiar hexagon formation at Saturn’s north pole.

A misty morning in October on the Isle of Wight is the setting for this image resembling an eerie scene from a science fiction film. The obscuring weather actually accentuated the brightness of Venus and the crescent Moon and transformed them to appear as glowing orbs floating over the Ashey countryside. It won the Skyscapes category for photographer Ainsley Bennett.

The judges said that the rainbow of colours exhibited by the brightest star in our sky, Sirius, was seemingly inspired by pop art. Sirius is often seen shining as a white star, but twinkles, or flashes, with hues of numerous colours, due to turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere. Since taking up astrophotography, Steve Brown, of Stokesley, North Yorkshire, UK, had been searching for the best way to display these colours in an image. He finally hit upon the idea of videoing the star and has then picked out the frames with the most striking colours to showcase the chameleon-like quality of the star. It won the Stars and Nebulae category.

The Young Astronomy Photographer Of The Year category was won by 15-year-old Brendan Devine, from Chicago, Illinois, with what the judges called a truly innovative image of the Moon that has been inverted to bring out the intricate details of the rugged, lunar landscape often missed in more traditional shots of our natural satellite. The inversion of the image has created high contrast not usually found in most images of the Moon, making it much easier to pick out detail, particularly in the craters. Veins and “splash marks” from the impacts of asteroids and meteorites easily observed in this image around the crater, Copernicus.

The Sir Patrick Moore Prize For Best Newcomer was awarded to Carlos Fairbairn, of Luziânia, Goiás, Brazil. He imaged the Milky Way’s small companion galaxy and close neighbour, the Large Magellanic Cloud, to showcase stars of all ages lying within its 14,000 light-year diameter. The Large Magellanic Cloud can be seen with the naked eye from the southern hemisphere, under dark skies, when it resembles a patch of cloud.

A special category for Robotic Scope was introduced for amateur astronomers using the internet to operate remote telescopes. This year it was won by Robert Smith, from the UK, for an image he took using the Liverpool Telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, on La Palma, in the Canary Islands.

His composite image compares the slitless spectroscopy of two planetary nebulae – the Cat’s Eye Nebula at the top, and the Ring Nebula below. Spectroscopy is used to analyse objects like stars and nebulae involves splitting the light from an object into individual colours, just like when white light passes through a prism to form a rainbow. This image shows that different parts of the two nebulae give off different types of light.

Chris Bramley, Editor of BBC Sky at Night Magazine, was one of the judges of the contest, which is now in its eighth year. He said: “There were so many fantastic images this year. The winning entries, and indeed the whole field, show that the entrants’ technical abilities and creative eye have never been sharper. They capture the quiet, majestic beauty of the night sky above a world that’s increasingly frenetic and light-polluted.” Now see last year’s winning entries here.