Check out some of 2016's best astronomy photography
The moon shines with a new light in a brilliant photo taken by a photographer from China.
The image (embedded below) shows Earth's natural satellite in the midst of a total solar eclipse on March 9 in Indonesia. Photographer Yu Jun won the top prize in 2016's Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition for the image.
"This is such a visually striking image, with its succession of fiery arcs all perfectly balanced around the pitch black circle of totality," Marek Kukula, a competition judge and astronomer at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, said in a statement.
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Other winning images this year show auroras dancing above beautiful vistas and cosmic objects starkly shining in the night sky.
Perhaps one of the most striking photos submitted to the competition actually came from deep in the heart of a huge, light-polluted city on Earth.
The image shows star trails streaking above Hong Kong and won the "People & Space" category of the competition.
“There were so many fantastic images this year," BBC Sky at Night Magazine editor Chris Bramley, another judge in the competition, said in the statement.
"The winning entries, and indeed the whole field, show that the entrants' technical abilities and creative eye have never been sharper. They capture the quiet, majestic beauty of the night sky above a world that’s increasingly frenetic and light-polluted.”
Check out more of the best astronomy photographs of the year below:
Lili Sams is a Photo Editor at Mashable, where she works to tell compelling stories utilizing the visual medium of photography. She graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism .
