Landscape astro photographer, Tom Rae, has won the Royal Museums Greenwich Skyscapes Astronomy Photographer of the Year for a second time.

Landscape astro photographer, Tom Rae, has won the Royal Museums Greenwich Skyscapes Astronomy Photographer of the Year for a second time.

His winning picture this year is ‘The Ridge’ taken at Aoraki Mount Cook is comprised of 62 individual photos stitched together to create a panoramic view.

Rae, who is based in Canterbury, scoped out the potential image by taking preparatory shots with his phone, he says.

“I climbed up this ridge line and I took some photos on my phone and then I thought yep, this is one that I’ll have to come back for when the Milky Way aligns, which was a year from that date.”

The winning image:

The winning composite photo, described by the photographer as “It's an image of a very sharp ridge line in Aoraki Mount Cook National Park with the Milky Way essentially banding over the top of the ridge line and the two valleys that I captured it over”. In my words, there is the ridge poking up in the middle in the foreground, a range of hills much further back with the ridge almost meeting them, then the milky way as a semi-circle in the dark sky