Atik 2017 Competition Winner Announced (Closed)

It’s the time many of you have been waiting for, the 2017 competition results!

Before we announce the winner we would like to take a moment to say thank you. The standard of entries keeps getting higher each year and it’s been a pleasure to look through so many great astroimages.

If you entered thank you and we hope to see you in future competitions, if you weren’t been able to enter this year it would be great to see an entry from you in our future competitions!

But now, without any further ado, the winner of our 2017 Astrophotography Competition is…

Alvaro Ibanez Perez for this great image of The Ghost Nebula

Taken using an Atik 460EX, a Takahashi FSQ106EDX telescope mounted upon a Takahashi EM400 mount.

A few words from our lucky winner:

“My name is Álvaro Ibáñez Pérez, I’m a 28 year old Spanish astrophotographer from Madrid. In 2012 I bought my first telescope and my first Canon DSLR camera and I started taking pictures of the sky, something I’ve been doing ever since.
Currently, I have a Takahashi FSQ106EDX telescope, a Takahashi EM400 mount and a fantastic monochromatic Atik 460ex CCD camera.
I constantly avoid the light pollution from my city, Madrid, so I usually travel more than 200km away from home to capture quality photographs.
My goal in the near future is to have my own observatory so I can take pictures during the week.

The Ghost Nebula is a reflection nebula located in the constellation Cepheus.
This photograph was taken from one of the darkest places in the Iberian Peninsula, Nerpio (Spain). This place can reach up to 21.8 – 21.9 SQM on good nights.
This was during a week-long outing this past summer with a group of friends, all astrophotographers, something we have been doing for the last 2 years.
Sh2-136 is one of the objects that I have always wanted to photograph. Very faint dust clouds that are a challenge for any astrophotographer. For 7 nights, I captured the Luminance and the color data, accumulating a total of 21h of exposure in sub-expositions of 600s.”

Astrophotography is our passion and it’s great to see such an incredible image come from one of our cameras. We’d like to give Alvaro a big congratulations and we’ll be sending him a brand new Atik Horizon camera along with the chance to stay at Les Granges. We’re really excited to see what images the future brings.

Highly Commended

With such a large amount of stunning images it would be unfair to only showcase the winner. Below is a small selection of entries that impressed us and you immensely, but didn’t quite take the winning spot. Click to view the images in full resolution.

Once again we’d like to say a big thank you to everyone that’s taken part this year. It’s a real pleasure for everyone here at Atik to view the stunning images taken with our cameras, we’re wondering if you are going to be able to keep the quality so high in future competitions!