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.

New Forest ponies graze as the sun rises over Godshill in the New Forest, Hants on September 18, 2022, on the day before the Queen's state funeral tomorrow. (Photo by Claire Sheppard/Solent News & Photo Agency)

A policeman controls traffic at 42nd Street and 7th Avenue as New York City remains without electricity caused by a blackout that affected the entire city and most of the eastern part of the nation August 15, 2003 in New York, New York. More than 50 million people were affected by the outage, in Toronto, Detroit, Cleveland and New York City. (Photo by Jose Jimenez/Primera Hora/Getty Images)

The Tree Projects team spent 67 days documenting one eucalyptus regnans in the Styx valley of Tasmania. Using a combination of tree-climbing and elaborate arboreal rigging techniques, they produced an intimate portrait from an impossible perspective of one of the world’s largest individual flowering trees, which goes by several common names. These photos document the process that resulted in an extraordinary ultra high-definition photograph. Here: Haley nears the top of the tree. (Photo by Steven Pearce/The Tree Projects/The Guardian)

A man stands next to a barricade blocking a road during a protest calling on the government to help ease the economic effects of an harmful algal bloom that had affected their livelihoods at Chiloe island in Chile, May 6, 2016. (Photo by Pablo Sanhueza/Reuters)

A worker manually changes the direction of the bonde, the typical tram line in Santa Teresa neighborhood, using a rope in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, September 9, 2015. The Santa Teresa bonde, called “Bondinho” in Portuguese, is running with passengers as a part of a test period, after the service was suspended in 2011 following an accident that killed six people, according to residents. (Photo by Pilar Olivares/Reuters)

The new 2011 Volkswagen Passant Variant (L) and new Golf Cabrio are lifted into one of two storage towers at the Autostadt customer reception center at the Volkswagen factory on the day of the German automaker's annual press conference on March 10, 2011 in Wolfsburg, Germany. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

A policeman reacts during a clash with protestors during a protest against the proposed changes to France's working week and layoff practices, in Lyon, central France, Thursday, April 28, 2016. French protesters are back on the streets over proposed reforms to the country's labor rules and strikers have forced cancellations and delays at two airports serving Paris. (Photo by Laurent Cipriani/AP Photo)