The David Malin Awards Name This Year's Sky Pictures

The Central West Astronomical Society has revealed the winners of this year's David Malin Awards, presented as part of its AstroFest programme and named after the photographer who shaped much of what deep-sky imaging looks like today. The selection ranges from wide landscape frames to deep space targets.

What has changed in amateur astrophotography is duration, not hardware. A single deep-sky image is now usually hundreds of frames stacked across several nights, cleaned and colour-mapped in software. The picture is real, but it belongs to weeks rather than to a moment, which forces every jury to decide where processing ends. Saturating colour and merging nights are accepted; introducing something that was never in the sky is not. It is one of the few photographic genres where truthfulness cannot be judged from the frame alone.