There were two joint winners for the Annie Maunder Prize for Image Innovation, both of which used inventive techniques in their compositions. One of them—“Celestial Fracture” by Leonardo Di Maggio—is an assembly of images of Saturn, its moons, and its rings. All the images were taken by the Cassini spacecraft between 2004 and 2007. Together, the images are a peculiar combination of straight lines (mostly from the rings) and curves (from the planet’s spherical shape). All in black and white, they allow the viewer to focus on the planet’s geometries without being distracted by its colors.
“A spectacular dance between science and art,” said Imad Ahmed, a competition judge and the director of the New Crescent Society, in a Royal Observatory Greenwich statement. “We associate Saturn with its timeless rings, but the quasi-cubist treatment, with its awkward angles, offered a refreshing perspective that really captured the judges’ imagination.”
The other winner is “Another Cloudy Day on Jupiter” by Sergio Díaz Ruiz of Spain. The image’s name pretty much speaks for itself: It’s a close-up look at a tranche of our favorite gas giant, a slurry of orange, rust, and off-white whorls. The image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on a number of different channels and color edited.