Kiwi electrician shortlisted for world's top astrophotography award

Evan McKay drives to the edge of darkness. He finds a remote patch of earth beneath New Zealand's volcanic peaks—Ruapehu, Tongariro, Taranaki—sets up his camera, and waits for the sky to reveal itself. By day he works as an electrician. By night, under the name Galactic Kiwi, he has become one of the country's most accomplished astrophotographers, and this month he learned he'd been shortlisted for the ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2026, widely regarded as the world's largest competition in the field.

McKay's path to this recognition began almost by accident. A space flight video game sparked something. Then came a fascination with NASA's archive of space photographs. Eventually he bought his first camera and discovered what he calls "the bug"—an obsession with capturing the night sky that has only deepened over the past year. He won Milky Way Photographer of the Year twice, in 2022 and again recently. Last year he took the night scape category at the New Zealand Astrophotography Competition. The shortlist for the ZWO award represents a leap onto an international stage.

What sets McKay's work apart is his method of composition. He doesn't simply photograph stars. He combines deep sky and Milky Way photography with terrestrial landscapes, creating images that anchor the cosmos to the earth below. A snowy mountain erupts beneath the Milky Way arch. Aurora australis dances above a beach despite nearby light pollution. The effect is to give viewers context—to show them not just what exists in space, but where it sits relative to the ground beneath their feet. His latest ambition is to add nebulae to this vocabulary: those interstellar clouds of gas and dust that remain invisible to the human eye. Using a dual-band filter that isolates only the hydrogen-alpha and oxygen-III spectra that nebulae emit, he captures full-colour panoramas of structures like the Carina Nebula and Orion Nebula. "It's about enhancing what's actually there, and not generating something that isn't," he said. He avoids generative AI work whenever possible.

Timing is everything in this pursuit. McKay has learned to read the calendar like a navigator reads stars. Matariki and the winter solstice—the longest night of the year—offer the best windows. During Matariki weekend, he drove to Tongariro and found conditions aligned: clear skies, a weather forecast that held, and a crescent moon just bright enough to illuminate the snowy peaks without washing out the stars. One of his favourite images came last month at Kai Iwi Beach, where he captured aurora australis in a panorama that felt, he said, surreal and unexpected. Another came recently on Taranaki maunga, where he timed a shoot to catch the Milky Way erupting from the mountain's silhouette. He knew the alignment would be brief. "Sometimes it's worth revisiting familiar locations," he reflected. "While the stars might remain constant, the landscape is never quite the same, and each visit tells its own story."

But the night sky is changing in ways that complicate his work. The number of satellites has grown dramatically during his years as a photographer. They streak across his images like unwanted guests, and he has had to develop technical workarounds—a statistical method called sigma-clipping to remove them in post-processing. "They're an eyesore," he said. "They're just extremely distracting."

Yet the work has transformed how McKay sees the universe. Looking at Hubble photographs of nebulae and galaxies, he realized he had no sense of where they actually sat in the sky. "You're actually looking at such tiny, little parts of the sky," he said. The scale of things—the vastness of what remains invisible—has become the real subject of his photography.

He is not finished building. McKay plans to automate his data collection process, which he describes as incredibly time-consuming. He wants to buy a four-wheel-drive vehicle to reach even more remote locations. The work of capturing the night sky, it turns out, is never truly complete. There is always another mountain, another alignment, another story the landscape and stars might tell together.