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The Royal Observatory Greenwich’s 13th Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition has announced its shortlist of extraordinary celestial scenes.

image copyrightPeter Feltoti

image captionBicolour Veil Nebula, a remnant of a giant supernova explosion, by Peter Feltoti from Hungary

The shortlisted photographers captured sights from across our Solar System, galaxy and the wider Universe.

image copyrightVitaliy Novikov

image captionAurora in Murmansk, Russia, by Vitaliy Novikov

The competition has received more than 4,500 entries from 75 countries.

The judges include Art Editor of BBC Sky at Night Magazine Steve Marsh, and comedian and keen amateur astronomer Jon Culshaw, alongside other experts from the worlds of art and astronomy.

The winning images will be displayed in an exhibition at the National Maritime Museum from 18 September.

Here is a selection of shortlisted images.

Dolphin Head Nebula, by Yovin Yahathugoda from Sri Lanka

image copyrightYovin Yahathugoda

This is one of the photographer’s favourite images and it remarkably depicts how interstellar winds and forces have created this perfect cosmic bubble in outer space.

The star responsible for creating the bubble is the bright star near the centre of the nebula and is categorised as a Wolf-Rayet star.

Harmony, by Stefan Liebermann from Germany

image copyrightStefan Liebermann

The image depicts a mesmerising panorama of the Milky Way over lavender fields in Valensole, France.

The colour tones and the lines of the fields are truly amazing, even though the light pollution is clearly visible over the whole area.

Iceland Vortex, by Larryn Rae from New Zealand

image copyrightLarryn Rae

This is a panorama of the aurora borealis in Iceland and is made up of 20 images.

The photographer came across an estuary that reflected the sky perfectly on a freezing winter’s night.

He captured the panorama first, and then took a shot of himself out on the ice.

Luna Park, by Ed Hurst from Australia

image copyrightEd Hurst

This immense face forms the entrance to Luna Park, Sydney’s harbourside theme park.

It has leered in the shadow of the Harbour Bridge since 1935 and many generations of children have skipped through its mouth for days of fun, as the world and the city have changed and grown around it.

The photographer took thousands of frames, with the stars passing by, and blended them together to show the patterns of time.

Moonrise over Jodrell Bank, by Matt Naylor from the UK

image copyrightMatt Naylor

It was the photographer’s long-held ambition to capture the Moon and the famous Lovell Telescope.

Finding a spot with a clear view, far enough away from the subject, and the Moon being in the sky at the correct time of day was all part of the puzzle.

The setting Sun lit up the clouds producing some lovely colours.

NGC 2024 – Flame Nebula, by Steven Mohr from Australia

image copyrightSteven Mohr

The Flame Nebula, designated as NGC 2024 and Sh2-277, is an emission nebula in the constellation Orion, lying some 900 to 1,500 light years away from Earth.

The bright star Alnitak (just outside the field of view at the top of this image), the easternmost star in the Belt of Orion, shines energetic ultraviolet light into the Flame and this knocks electrons away from the great clouds of hydrogen gas that reside there.

Much of the glow results when the electrons and ionised hydrogen recombine.

NGC 3981, by Bernard Miller from the USA

image copyrightBernard Miller

NGC 3981 is a spiral galaxy about 65 million light years away in the constellation Crater.

Its windswept look is due to its outer arms being stripped away by an interaction with another galaxy.

Path of the Full Moon above the Sleeping City, by Remi Leblanc-Messager from France

image copyrightRemi Leblanc-Messager

The photographer’s aim for this image was to focus on the Moon’s trajectory at the centre of the photograph, dividing the human world from the sky.

The woman standing on the roof appears to be the link between Paris and the sky.

Pleiades Sisters, by Jashanpreet Singh Dingra from India

image copyrightJashanpreet Singh Dingra

This is an outstanding image of shining stars over the photographer’s region in winter.

The Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters and Messier 45, is an open star cluster containing middle-aged, hot B-type stars in the north-west of the constellation Taurus.

Saturn at its Best, by Damian Peach from the UK

image copyrightDamian Peach

In this image, Saturn displays a wealth of details across the globe and ring system.

The famous polar hexagon can be seen around the pole at the bottom, while many other belts and zones are seen across the planet.

Star trails over the Lujiazui City Skyline, by Daning Kai in China

image copyrightDaning Kai

This image shows star trails over Lujiazui city in Pudong District, China, and you can even distinguish the Belt of Orion.

The photographer captured this photo on a very clear autumn night.

Star Watcher, by Yang Sutie in China

image copyrightYang Sutie

As the photographer was driving on the mountain road late at night and turned the corner, he saw a mound on the right side of the road.

He stopped and climbed up the side of the road, set the camera to shoot automatically, and then drove back and forth in this curve.

Then he climbed up the hillside and integrated himself into the picture.

Sunrise of the Magic City, by Jiajun Hua from China

image copyrightJiajun Hua

The photo is taken 16km (10 miles) away from Lujiazui financial district in Shanghai.

Every year there are only a few weeks when photographers can capture the scene of the Sun rising in the Central Business District.

The photo is composed of four different exposures from the same perspective, recording the process of the Sun rising.

The Exceptionally Active Ion Tail of Comet 2020F8 SWAN, by Gerald Rhemann from Austria

image copyrightGerald Rhemann

In this photo the very gas-rich comet shows numerous structures in its ion tail.

The difficulty with comet imaging is not only to compensate for the movement of the comet in front of the stars, but also to consider the rapid changes in the structures during the exposure time.

The Soul of Space (Close-up of the Soul Nebula), by Kush Chandaria from the UK

image copyrightKush Chandaria

The Soul Nebula is one of those incredible targets that no matter where you point your telescope, there are always some incredible structures and details to be uncovered.

With 14 hours of exposure, faint details and structures deep within the nebula began to emerge.

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CALIFORNIA: Fast-spreading variants of the Covid-19-causing coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, carry mutations that enable the virus to escape some of the immune response created naturally or by vaccination. A new study by a team of researchers has revealed key details of how these escape mutations work.
The scientists at Scripps Research, along with collaborators in Germany and the Netherlands, whose study appears in Science, used structural biology techniques to map at high resolution how important classes of neutralizing antibodies bind to the original pandemic strain of SARS-CoV-2–and how the process is disrupted by mutations found in new variants first detected in Brazil, the United Kingdom, South Africa and India.
The research also highlights that several of these mutations are clustered in one site, known as the “receptor binding site,” on the spike protein of the virus. Other sites on the receptor binding domain are unaffected.
“An implication of this study is that, in designing next-generation vaccines and antibody therapies, we should consider increasing the focus on other vulnerable sites on the virus that tend not to be affected by the mutations found in variants of concern,” says co-lead author Meng Yuan, PhD.
Yuan is a postdoctoral research associate in the laboratory of senior author Ian Wilson, DPhil, Hansen Professor of Structural Biology and Chair of the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology at Scripps Research.
How ‘variants of concern’ escape immune response
SARS-CoV-2 “variants of concern” include the UK’s B.1.1.7 variants, South Africa’s B.1.351 variants, Brazil’s P.1 variants and India’s B.1.617 variants. Some of these variants appear to be more infectious than the original Wuhan strain. Recent studies have found that antibody responses generated through natural infection to the original strain or via vaccination are less effective in neutralizing these variant strains.
Because of the variants’ potential to spread and cause disease–perhaps in some cases, despite vaccination–scientists consider it urgent to discover how the variants manage to escape much of the prior immune response in the body, including the antibody response.
In the study, the researchers focused mainly on three mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein: K417N, E484K and N501Y. Alone or in combination, these mutations are found in most major SARS-CoV-2 variants. All of the mutations are found in the SARS-CoV-2 receptor binding site, which the where the virus attaches to host cells.
The researchers tested representative antibodies from the major classes that target the general area in and around the receptor binding site. They found that many of these antibodies lose their ability to effectively bind and neutralize the virus when the mutations are present.
Using structural imaging techniques, the team then mapped the relevant portion of the virus at atomic-scale resolution to examine how the mutations affect sites where antibodies otherwise would bind and neutralize the virus.
“This work provides a structural explanation for why antibodies elicited by Covid-19 vaccines or natural infection by the original pandemic strain are often ineffective against these variants of concern,” Wilson says.
Zeroing in on points of vulnerability
The findings suggest that while antibody responses to the SARS-CoV-2 receptor binding site can be very potent in neutralizing the original Wuhan strain, certain variants are able to escape–perhaps eventually necessitating updated vaccines.
At the same time, the study underlines the fact that the three key viral mutations, which SARS-CoV-2 seems inherently prone to develop, do not alter other vulnerable sites on the virus outside the receptor binding site. The researchers specifically showed that virus-neutralizing antibodies targeting two other areas outside the receptor binding site were largely unaffected by these three mutations.
This suggests that future vaccines and antibody-based treatments could provide broader protection against SARS-CoV-2 and its variants by eliciting or utilizing antibodies against parts of the virus that lie outside the receptor binding site. The researchers note that broad protection against variants may be necessary if, as seems likely, the virus becomes endemic in the human population.
The Wilson lab and collaborators in this study are continuing to study human antibody responses to variants of concern and hope to identify strategies for broad protection against not only SARS-CoV-2 and its variants but also SARS-CoV-1 and other related, emergent coronaviruses.

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