With a stunning image of the Andromeda Galaxy, two Chinese teenagers won the Young Competition award in the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2022 competition hosted by the Royal Observatory Greenwich in London.

Competition judge Laszlo Francsics called the photograph "a very natural-looking rendering of the Andromeda Galaxy."

"It's a superb capture by a young astrophotographer, who also demonstrates exceptional talent in processing a deep-sky photo," Francsics said. 

The 14-year-old winners are Yang Hanwen, a junior high-school student from Xiamen, east China's Fujian Province, and Zhou Zezhen, a high-school student from Shaoxing, east China's Zhejiang Province. They collaborated on the image, with one responsible for the shooting and the other for computer processing.

"The Andromeda Galaxy is one of the closest and largest neighbors of the Milky Way, and also the most distant object the human eye can see," the young winners said. "When you look at it with the naked eye it's like a fog, but through the telescope it shows its magnificence."

The annual competition features the world's greatest space photography and welcomes photographers from across the globe, said the observatory. This year's winning images shall remain on display at the National Maritime Museum in London till August 2023.