ESO's "Hidden Treasures" Astrophotography Contest Shows Incredibly Talented Amateurs
ESO Hidden Treasures Winner Igor Chekalin The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has announced the winners of its Hidden Treasures astrophotography contest. Hidden Treasures asks amateur astronomers with an artistic bent (or artists with an astronomic bent) to take the raw, greyscale data from ESO's archives and do what ESO hires a team of professionals to do: Translate that data into gorgeous images of the universe. We've compiled a gallery of a few of our favorites, and trust us, these are as good as any professional efforts we've seen. This kind of imaging is no easy task; the amateur entrants had to scour the ESO's many terabytes of data just to find an image that would, with proper processing and artistic recreation, yield something we'd want to look at. And that's all before the actual processing, which entails an awful lot of correcting, sharpening, and adjusting for the limits of the telescopes'...