At first glance, it looks like something out of a sci-fi blockbuster: a swirling tunnel of teal and coral-red gas, opening onto a deep, star-speckled void. The image by Israeli astrophotographer Kfir Simon was named runner-up in the Stars and Nebulae category of ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2026. And you can see why.
But what are we actually looking at? The picture, titled Beyond the Wormhole, captures the centre of the Helix Nebula (NGC 7293), which is around 650 light years away in the constellation Aquarius.
The bright star in the middle is a white dwarf: the remains of a star that shed its outer layers thousands of years ago to form the nebula. But the truly interesting story is not the nebula itself but what's behind it.
As Simon explains: “This image of the Helix Nebula (NGC 7293) showcases the galaxies that sit many millions of light years beyond it, as if we are looking at them through a wormhole. The picture is a crop of the central core of the nebula and has been processed in order to reveal the tiny galaxies. To my surprise, there are many more than I had imagined.”
Location and kit
The image was captured in June 2025 at Tivoli Southern Sky Guest Farm near Windhoek in Namibia. Studies have ranked the location as having one of the least light-polluted and darkest night skies on Earth, with artificial light increasing the natural sky brightness by only about 2%.
Simon shot the scene with a Moravian Instruments C3 Pro camera, built around a 61MP, full-frame Sony IMX455 sensor. He was shooting through an ASA 600 telescope, whose main mirror measures 600mm (24 inches) across, with a 4,200mm focal length.
That long focal length gives the telescope extraordinary reach. Each pixel records a patch of sky about as wide as a penny seen from 23km away, which is why galaxies just a few pixels across show up at all.
The trade-off is a narrow view: the whole frame takes in a patch of sky roughly the width of the full Moon. And because the Helix is one of the largest nebulae in our sky, appearing almost as big as the Moon itself; even this frame only just contains it.
Simon cropped the full 9,576 x 6,388-pixel frame to around 7,087 x 5,209 pixels and still had enough resolution to pick out galaxies that were only a few pixels across.
Most images of the Helix show the whole thing as a giant eye, commonly known as the Eye of God. By cropping the shot in this way, though, Simon has transformed the nebula from a subject into a frame. The gas looks like the walls of a tunnel, with the white dwarf a beacon at its centre, drawing the eye through and out into the far universe.
The ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year is the world’s largest astrophotography competition, hosted by the Royal Observatory Greenwich, London. The winning and shortlisted images are currently on display at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
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