“This 12 months, as we attain the photo voltaic most of the present photo voltaic cycle, the Northern and Southern Lights have been extra energetic than ever, illuminating skies in surprising locations the place they’ve hardly ever—if ever—been photographed,” say the organizers of the 2024 Northern Lights Photographer of the 12 months contest.
Bringing collectively the work of dozens of photographers around the globe, the distinctive competitors highlights the countless number of landscapes, atmospheric circumstances, and astronomical phenomena that mix into otherworldly visions of the sky.

When photo voltaic wind causes disturbances within the earth’s magnetosphere, we’re typically handled to luminous, rippling skies. The phenomenon is also known as the northern lights, or aurora borealis, and within the southern hemisphere, it’s aurora australis. Coined by Seventeenth-century astronomer Galileo, the names draw on historical Greco-Roman deities who watched over the daybreak (Aurora) and the northerly and southerly winds (Borealis and Australis, respectively).
Introduced by Seize the Atlas, which mixes vacation spot picture excursions with steering and tutorials for photographers of all ability ranges, the competitors’s prime 25 photos—a choice of our favorites included right here—span locales from Spain to Namibia to Arizona.
Uroš Fink’s gorgeous seize from Istria, Croatia, foregrounds a superb aurora with a Perseid meteor bathe. He described the second like being “handled to a ‘multi-course menu’ of the night time sky,” through which he captured not solely the greenish glow but in addition the Milky Approach, the constellation Orion, Zodiacal mild, and the distant glow of Jupiter and Mars.
Different winners embrace Tom Rae’s glowing view of the Milky Approach bathed in pink mild, taken from Aoraki/Mt. Prepare dinner Nationwide Park, New Zealand, and Josh Beames’s dramatic drone shot of an erupting volcano in Iceland set towards a luminous inexperienced curtain.
Discover all the finalists in Seize the Atlas’s on-line gallery, and hold an eye fixed out for updates about journey alternatives and the following contest on Instagram.








