I’ve blogged before about the sensational Starmus Festival planned for this coming September in the Canary Islands. This get-together of great minds in space exploration, astronomy, cosmology, planetary science, biology, art, and music is like no other event on Earth. Speakers will be announced over the coming weeks — those already in the lineup include astronaut-explorers Charlie Duke, Edgar Mitchell, Jack Schmitt, and Alexei Leonov; Nobel Prize winners Robert Wilson and Harold Kroto; biologist Richard Dawkins; astronomer and rock star Brian May; astronomers Garik Israelian, Jill Tarter, and Robert Williams; and rock musician Rick Wakeman.
On top of everything else going on at Starmus, there will also be an astrophotography competition! Here is the full press release below . . .
Starmus Astrophotography Competition
We are very pleased to announce an astrophotography competition open to everyone who enjoys capturing the elusive beauty of the night sky — and is good at it. What “good” means is inevitably subjective, but it includes aesthetic merit, technical quality, and originality, and these are the criteria that the three judges will be looking for.
The judging panel will consist of David Eicher (USA), editor, Astronomy Magazine; Rogelio Bernal Andreo (USA), world-renowned astrophotographer well-known for his images of deep-sky objects; and Damian Peach (UK) former Astronomy photographer of the year.
The competition is one of many events associated with the Starmus Festival that will take place in the Canary Islands between September 22 and 27, 2014, and the overall winner will enjoy an all expenses paid trip to the festival and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to carry out a 60-minute observation of the object of his/her choice with the largest optical telescope in the world: the Gran Telescopio Canarias located on the island of La Palma. We will also award attractive prizes to the best entrant in three other categories. The cash equivalent of the winning prize will be $2,000.
Up to five entries can be accepted in each of four categories, up to a maximum of 10 images, which can be monochrome or color:
1. Wide-field images, including star trails, twilights, TWAN-style pictures, tracked or untracked, but taken using off-the-shelf consumer cameras.
2. Solar system objects, which would include solar, lunar, planetary, cometary, etc., photography using any technique or equipment, including webcams.
3. Deep-sky pictures made with telescopes. This category can include galaxies, nebulae, star cluster and star fields, anything beyond the solar system.
4. Animations, by which we mean movies of any sort, provided the main ingredient is real astronomical image content.
Full details of the competition rules and how to enter and submit images are provided in the Competition rules and Conditions.
For more information, see www.starmus.com.
Stay tuned for more on Starmus coming soon!