Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2010

The Astronomy Photographer of the Year Flickr group, exhibition and competition are organised and owned by the Board of Trustees of the National Maritime Museum (‘Royal Observatory Greenwich’).

The Astronomy Photographer of the Year Flickr group is open to anyone, and the annual competition is open to anyone except those involved in its organisation and employees (and their immediate family) of the National Maritime Museum, Royal Observatory Greenwich, BBC, BBC Worldwide Limited and Yahoo!. Employees (or their immediate families) of the official competition sponsors are also restricted from entering the competition.

Entries to the competition open on Wednesday 13 January 2010 and close at midday (BST) on Friday 16 July 2010. To enter the three main categories of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition you will first need to add your photos to the Astronomy Photographer of the Year group on the photo-sharing website, Flickr. If you are under 16 and would like to enter your photos into the Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year category, you will do so via this website.

Entrants to the three main categories may submit up to five photos per month to the Astronomy Photographer of the Year Flickr group and five photos in total to the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. By adding a photo to the group on Flickr you confirm to the Royal Observatory Greenwich that it:

Photos that have already been previously published or submitted to a print publication, or that have won a prize in a major competition (one receiving more than 500 photos) are not eligible. Photos taken more than two years before the competition closing date are also not eligible (i.e. taken before 16 July 2008).

Entry Fee None

And we’d be really grateful if you could:

* geotag (add your photo to a map) on Flickr, so we know where it was taken
* tag your photo with the time it was taken in Greenwich Mean Time, in the format astro:gmt=yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm
* describe what your photo shows and tag it with the name of its main astronomical subject, using the format astro:subject=insertsubjectname. You can find out more about how to do this with our guide, Astrotags explained
* share your camera settings as additional information about the photo
* if applicable, tag your photo with the telescope equipment it was taken with.

This technical information (‘astrotagging’) will help us to create a visualisation of the Universe from your photos on Flickr. We will also add some further astrotags and notes to group photos automatically. If you want to opt out of this, please add the tag astro:notes=no to your picture. You can also delete tags and notes if you want to.

Overall winner – Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2010 Prize: £1000, and more prizes for each category.

Copyright: For each photo that you add to the group on Flickr, you grant the Royal Observatory Greenwich a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to use, publicly perform and publicly display by means of the Flickr API (“Application Programming Interface”) your photo solely in connection with the Astronomy Photographer of the Year group, competition and exhibition, without any further notice or remuneration to you. This applies to all images in the group including those not entered in the competition.

Entries close on Friday 16 July 2010.

Official website here