This Year's AstroFest Winners Will Leave You FLOORED

"This amazingly detailed image is of the southern sky's most interesting nebula around its most dynamic and unstable star, Eta Carina. The whole frame reveals excellent colour balance, beautifully controlled dynamic range and admirable fine structure, visible thoughout. Beautiful!"

"This is a very challenging field to photograph, given its enormous extent and very wide dynamic range, with the very bright Orion nebula and the delicately structured faint arc of Barnard's Loop. These issues are beautifully handled here and the image is aesthetically well balanced and presented. A worthy winner."

"This dramatic image has evidently composed itself, beneath a night sky scattered with pin-point stars, and it emphasises the fleeting and unexpected colours and dramatic clouds of a passing thunderstorm. A remarkably beautiful night-time landscape."

"The Moon's dark surface has subtle colour variations that give its reflected light its slightly yellowish hue. In this excellent image these colours are deliberately exaggerated, revealing the varying composition of our satellite's surface."

"A very well structured image that includes the distinctive band of the distant Milky Way above the yellow glow of Melbourne, about 100 km away on the horizon. It combines the bad and the beautiful in a way that catches the eye and obliges the thoughtful observer to consider the scene, which was the intention of this category."