Stargazing

    

    

Flickr is full of wonderful photos… but have you ever noticed that there’s some stellar photography in the Flickrverse? I mean really stellar, in the celestial sense.

It just so happens that this year is the International Year of Astronomy, so there are lots of interesting activities happening around the world with many opportunities learn more about astronomy photography.

The clever bods at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich have set up a group on Flickr in conjunction with their Astronomy Photographer of the Year project. If you add your photo featuring stars, moons, planets or galaxies to their group, it will be displayed at the Astronomy Photographer of the Year exhibition in September 2009.

They’ve also teamed up with Astrometry.net who have built a robot that automatically add astrotags to photos in the group (astrotagging is the celestial equivalent of geotagging).

Jim (aka eat your greens) from the Royal Observatory team has even developed a neat tool, which allows you to see photos from the group correctly positioned on a map of the sky.

If this sounds like your kind of thing, be sure to check out the plethora of astronomy groups already on Flickr, the wondrous astronomy clusters and some great posts about astro-tagging over at the code.flickr weblog.

Photos from mpastro2001, orvaratli, jamieball833, and evansg.