The hobby is surprisingly accessible. Most of these images were made with specialised equipment but the milky way landscapes could be created with practically any modern interchangeable lens camera (or some compacts) and a fast lens (and a very dark location!). https://www.lonelyspeck.com/ has some good guides.
There are some excellent open source programs to reduce noise in the images by stacking multiple exposures and some ingenious algorithms.
What level of validation goes into judging these images? I.e. ensuring they aren't physically-impossible, doctored, composite images. Guessing it's not too hard to validate?
Sorry off topic, but I clicked the "Manage" option on the cookie consent banner to find out there are 86 "Necessary" cookies that are required on the site, then almost 200 more optional cookies I can choose to opt out of. Talk about bloat, seems completely ridiculous.
The 84439th rule of messageboardclub is we do not talk about bloatclub.
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
What's worse is how they do it on mobile. Usually there's just a button to only accept the necessary cookies, but I just kept scrolling and scrolling and they just kept giving me more and more options to toggle off eventually gave up, deciding that I cannot view the article.
https://www.rmg.co.uk/whats-on/astronomy-photographer-year/g...
I've never been to Norway, not sure how common something like that is but it looks incredible