/ 2025 / Nature / Astrophotography

• Prize
  Honorable Mention
• Photographer
  Yukio Nodo, Japan

As twilight fades into darkness, the Milky Way begins to rise—silent, immense, and ancient. It is not merely beautiful. It feels sentient, like something watching from beyond time. There is a strange gravity in its glow, pulling not just the eye, but the soul. I stood before it with a sense of unease—not fear, but a primal reverence. The kind of dread that comes not from danger, but from the realization of how small we are. In this encounter, I saw not just stars, but the face of something divine—vast, cold, and unanswerable.