Winners of WSC23: Astronomy

The following post list the winners of WSC 2023.

Comment from the author:

Since as far back as I can remember, I’ve been interested in the stars, and some of my earliest memories are of looking up at the skies and asking my elders “why?” as kids tend to do. This is what led to me being a scientist. Since age 7, when I got my first telescope, I’ve been an amateur astronomer. In 1986, when Halley’s Comet was visible, I was 13 and I learned to build my own reflecting telescope at that time, but technology wasn’t good enough for the average person to capture images of what I saw.

I was not a rich student in college so my hobby took a back seat, but once I began my professional career, I started using my disposable income to buy a lot of telescopes and technology finally caught up to enable amateurs to produce amazing images. All this took off in high gear when we moved to rural western New York on Lake Ontario in 2014, which has fairly dark skies. It was a few years of getting progressively better: I was a national finalist in 2019, but later on I was able to produce some of my best images ever, which I submitted to the 2021 Wiki Science Competition where I was named an international winner. However, following that productive period, between travel during the summer and weather not cooperating, my imaging had slowed down. I also focussed more on quality instead of quantity and with better processing so there were fewer submissions this time around to the 2023 Wiki Science Competition.

The Lion Nebula is an extended emission nebula in the constellation Cepheus. Its apparent distance is more than 10,000 light years away from Earth. While it fits nicely within the FOV of my 4″ scope reduced to 490mm focal length, it is estimated to be about 250 light years across. (For reference, the diametre of our planet Earth is 0.0425 light seconds across!) The Lion Nebula (particularly the parts outside the “head”) is very faint, which is why I spent so much time on this target, and I was trying hard to get the mesh-like body below the head and outer structures and filaments which shows up the most with the O3 filter on which I collected ~24 hours worth of data. Most of the images shown were processed by first creating an original LHOO/SHO image, removing the stars, light processing, and then putting the stars back at a reduced size. Overall, this was a challenging image to process but the effort is reasonably worth it.

Professionally, I am currently a computational biology and bioinformatics Professor at the University at Buffalo researching multiscale modelling of macromolecular structure, function, interaction, design, and evolution at multiple scales.

Comment from the jury:

The “astronomy” category has been firmly established since the previous edition and is one of the most specialized within the competition. Determining the winner goes beyond simply appealing to the general judging panel, thus heavily relying on feedback from dedicated jurors (including former jurors) and the Wikimedia community. This image met all the above criteria, and its superior quality compared to other media in its Commons category and its comprehensive description further confirmed its excellence.

Runners-up:

Files were published under CC BY 4.0 license.