The Royal Observatory just announced its Astronomy Photographer Of The Year 2013 winners. Australian photographer Mark Gee was chosen among a thousand amateur and professional photographers around the globe to win the top title. His work is part of an exhibition of the winning photographers, which opened on Sept. 19 at the Royal Observatory Greenwich. The Royal Observatory shared with us the winners and notable mentions of the competition. Their descriptions of the prizewinners can be found below the images.

The French graphic designer and photographer uses a method he calls “digital matte painting”, layering several photos on top of each other to create an incandescent composition that seems eerily familiar yet ultimately impossible. Filled with tumbling clouds and glowing focal points, the images possess a depth that stretches the two-dimensional canvases backward as violent skies seem to undulate before the viewers' eyes.

A young woman cools herself in a fountain in Budapest, Hungary July 6, 2015. Over the weekend, a heat wave has reached Hungary with temperatures topping 38 degrees Celsius (100.4 degrees Fahrenheit). (Photo by Laszlo Balogh/Reuters)

These poignant portraits look to shine awareness on the plight of some of the world’s most endangered ecosystems and species of wildlife. The images combine animals, art and celebrity, with Asia's top models posing with the likes of rhinos, giraffes, leopards and marine life. Here: Mikki Yao with an Asian Elephant. (Photo by Sean Lee-Davies/Caters News)

“Wombats are Australian marsupials; they are short-legged, muscular quadrupeds, approximately 1 metre (39 in) in length with a short, stubby tail. They are adaptable in their habitat tolerances, and are found in forested, mountainous, and heathland areas of south-eastern Australia, including Tasmania, as well as an isolated patch of about 300 ha in Epping Forest National Park in central Queensland”. – Wikipedia

Photo: “Abdul”, a baby Common Wombat, is one of the marsupials on show during the spring baby boom at Taronga Zoo September 1, 2005 in Sydney, Australia. “Abdul” was orphaned when his mother was killed by a car. (Photo by Mark Nolan/Getty Images)

Two women jump into a frozen pond as they compete in the Polar Plunge at Frozen Dead Guy Days in Nederland, Colorado March 14, 2015. The winter festival in the small mountain town commemorates the 1994 discovery of the corpse of Bredo Morstol, which is now housed in a shed on dry ice above the town. (Photo by Rick Wilking/Reuters)

A member of the “Exit Point” amateur rope-jumping group jumps from a 44-metre high (144-feet high) waterpipe bridge in the Siberian Taiga area outside Krasnoyarsk, September 28, 2014. Fans of rope-jumping, a kind of extreme sport involving a jump from a high point using an advanced system of amortization including mountaineering and rope safety equipment, attended the Golden Autumn group's jumping season. (Photo by Ilya Naymushin/Reuters)

The three peaks of Lavaredo, or the “Tre Cime di Lavaredo” in Italian, are three distinctive battlement-like peaks, in the Sexten Dolomites of northeastern Italy. They are probably one of the best-known mountain groups in the Alps, and one of the most photographed in Italy. The three peaks are named, from east to west, "little peak" (Cima Piccola), "big peak" (Cima Grande) and "western peak" (Cima Ovest). The Cima Grande has an elevation of 2,999 metres (9,839 ft). It stands between the Cima Piccola, at 2,857 metres (9,373 ft), and the Cima Ovest, at 2,973 metres (9,754 ft).