I'm very happy to echo my congrats to Troy for his overall win.
While I've had my fair share of success and failures since the very first "Malin" it's been very gratifying to see this contest bloom into a showcase of excellence in Astro-imaging over the last 12 years.
I've talked with David many times over the years and am continually amazed by his quantitative knowledge of a multitude of celestial objects and their intrinsic structure & colours....e.g. getting a little colour bias here or there is not fatal to an entry, but processing an object to look blue, when it is really red, or making it look dark when it's bright or bright neon when it should be a pastel will see an entry culled fairly quickly.
I suspect mother nature's vistas, when skillfully captured, are both beautiful and surprising enough without any need to tart-up an image like the covergirl of some glossy magazine.
Some don't like this pragmatic approach.
All I can say is if you don't like it, don't make snide remarks afterwards and don't enter next time.
In 2015 there were nearly 4x more entries than its inaugural year. Around 200,000 people will see the travelling exhibition. Wow.
Given the stratospheric level of so many entries, I suspect now is the time to start working (well, for me at least) on the 2016 comp
