Everyone loves a good space photo, but what we’re actually talking about here are the Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year Awards for 2016.

That means entrants can range right through from International Space Station shots to star trails captured using a timelapse from earth, and entrants have certainly flooded in.

Winners will only be announced on September 15, but let’s take a run through five of the more stunning ones with the help of Mashable:

A Royal Spoonbill sits atop of a branch basking in the glow of the nearly full moon in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand

The vivid green Northern Lights resemble a bird soaring over open water in Olderdalen, Norway.

The Perseid Meteor Shower shoots across the sky in the early hours of August 13, 2015, appearing to cascade from Mount Shasta in California, USA. The composite image features roughly 65 meteors captured by the photographer between 12:30 a.m. and 4:30 a.m.

A tremendous filaprom extends from the surface of our star, the sun. Filaproms are large, gaseous features that can be partially seem over the Sun’s disk as a filament, and they are known to reach lengths equal to 150 Earths aligned.

About 12 million light-years away from our planet, lays the starburst galaxy M82, also known as the Cigar Galaxy. In a show of radiant red, the superwind bursts out from the galaxy, believed to be the closest place to our planet in which the conditions are similar to that of the early Universe, where a plethora of stars are forming.

Go ahead and look at the rest of these beauts HERE.

[source:mashable]