A photographer working from the desert outside Kuwait City has won the world's largest astrophotography competition with an image of a faint, sprawling cloud of gas and dust that looks, from the right angle, uncannily like a shark cruising through space.
Ali Alobaidly's photograph, titled "The Quiet Predator," shows the Shark Nebula, a dim nebula roughly 650 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cepheus. The image, built from more than 28 hours of accumulated exposure captured over two nights from Kuwait's Jahra governorate, was named overall winner of the ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition, run by the Royal Observatory Greenwich and Royal Museums Greenwich.
Judges singled out the photograph for pulling unusual detail out of a target that barely registers to most telescopes. The Shark Nebula is what astronomers call a faint emission nebula, dust and ionized gas so sparse it typically needs many hours of stacked long exposures, along with specialized filters, to appear as more than a smudge. Alobaidly shot the image with an Askar 140 APO telescope, a Sky-Watcher EQ8-R mount and a ZWO ASI2600MM Pro camera, according to the competition organizers.
Thousands of entries, one shark
Now in its 18th year, the ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest drew almost 4,000 entries in 2026 from amateur and professional astrophotographers in 66 countries, judged across categories that range from wide-field skyscapes to close-ups of planets and auroras. This year's shortlist, reported widely under headlines about "royal" auroras and a "Venusian pearl," included winners photographing everything from the rings of Saturn to sprite lightning above thunderstorms.
Winners were announced Thursday, September 17, during an online ceremony, and the full set of prize-winning images is now on public display in a dedicated exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England. Alobaidly received a prize of £10,000, or roughly $13,300, for the overall win.
The Greenwich exhibition remains open to the public, with the shortlisted and winning images also viewable online, including entries honored for aurora, planetary and deep-sky photography alongside Alobaidly's overall-winning shark in the stars.
