Bigger Picture: Wide awake for the win – Dunedin photographer wins aurora prize

Dunedin amateur photographer Kavan Chay spent 24 hours awake to capture this winning image of the Aurora Australis when it illuminated southern skies in May last year.

“The reds were a level of intensity I had never experienced,” he said of the light show created by an intense geomagnetic
storm. Chay, who teaches at the University of Otago’s medical school, positioned himself and his Nikon Z7 astro-modified camera at Tumbledown Bay, near Little River on Banks Peninsula, and shot “panorama after panorama”.

The image, Crown of Light, has just won the Aurorae category at the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s annual Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition.

It’s not Chay’s first nightscape to win global recognition: he was a winner in the 2024 Milky Way Photographer of the Year, too. Another New Zealander, Tom Rae, won the Skyscapes category in the Greenwich finals. To see all the winning works, visit rmg.co.uk.

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