The aurora runner up is fantastic:

https://www.rmg.co.uk/whats-on/astronomy-photographer-year/g...

I've never been to Norway, not sure how common something like that is but it looks incredible

The hobby is surprisingly accessible. Most of these images were made with specialised equipment but the milky way landscapes could be created with practically any modern interchangeable lens camera (or some compacts) and a fast lens (and a very dark location!). https://www.lonelyspeck.com/ has some good guides.

There are some excellent open source programs to reduce noise in the images by stacking multiple exposures and some ingenious algorithms.

What level of validation goes into judging these images? I.e. ensuring they aren't physically-impossible, doctored, composite images. Guessing it's not too hard to validate?

With some of the new hobby level products like Vespera it is so easy to capture similar images yourself.

For how many people and how easy it us to take a picture of Andromeda I'm surprised that was never seen before.

wow, that shot of the moon and Mars is amazingly cool. the timing and the clarity is phenomenal.

Sorry off topic, but I clicked the "Manage" option on the cookie consent banner to find out there are 86 "Necessary" cookies that are required on the site, then almost 200 more optional cookies I can choose to opt out of. Talk about bloat, seems completely ridiculous.