The DarkSky photo competition has announced its 2026 winners, with Paul Wilson taking first place in the Nightscape category for a panorama spanning the entire southern night sky in South Australia's Flinders Ranges.
Winners across categories
Other top entries included a cosy Californian mountain lookout hut, which won the Quality Lighting and Design category for Ross Steensland, and The Impact of Light Pollution category went to Kouyu Wang, whose image features a newly launched Starlink satellite group over China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
Dennis Lehtonen won first place in the Nighttime Adventures category with an incredible view of aurora over the Prince Christian Sound in Greenland.
Competition highlights
The photo competition, now in its sixth year, celebrates the art of documenting the wonders of dark skies and aims to highlight loss of dark skies through increasing light pollution.
Spokesperson for DarkSky Drew Reagan said: "This year's winning photographs were selected from more than 2,288 submissions representing 30 countries, spanning sweeping Milky Way vistas, extraordinary nocturnal wildlife, adventures under the stars, and images documenting the growing threats facing the nighttime environment."
Other notable winners included Enrique Barquet in Mobile Nighttime Photography, who captured an aurora above Mount Shuksan, Washington, during the geomagnetic storm of May 10–11, 2024, and Kat Lawman in International Dark Sky Places, with a self-portrait framing Orion within Turret Arch at Arches National Park.
