The winners of the CARTA Image Competition for 2025/2026 were announced last week: Kyra Kummer (University of Cape Town) and Tim Galvin (CSIRO). CARTA (Cube Analysis and Rendering Tool for Astronomy) is a world-leading astronomy visual analytics platform designed to address the challenges of accessing, visualising, and analysing extremely large astronomical datasets.  CARTA enables researchers to work directly with massive remote data stores through a web browser. Its architecture is capable of supporting data cubes of several TB in production environments while continuing to scale to meet the growing demands of next-generation astronomy.

Kyra Kummer’s image of the MeerKAT View of IC 5332’s Extended HI Disk is shown above at left.  IC 5332 is a face-on, spiral galaxy, 9.0 mega-parsecs away.  It hosts an extended ultraviolet disk, suggesting recent massive star-formation in the galactic outskirts. Kyra’s image of IC 5332 combines optical images from the Legacy Survey Data Release 10 with a high-resolution (8.3 arcsecond) MeerKAT L-band image of IC 5332’s neutral atomic hydrogen (HI) disk. The optical image shows emission from the twinkling stellar component of IC 5332, as well as numerous background galaxies. The HI emission — produced by the spin-flip transition of the HI atoms — is shown in crimson red, and traces IC 5332’s extended HI disk. (Image credit: K L Kummer and the PHANGS team; SARAO; CARTA)

Tim Galvin’s image, above right, shows Deep Radio-Continuum Insights Towards the Galactic Plane With ASKAP.  The 30 square degree field of view is enabled by the phased array feed receiver system on the ASKAP radio telescope.  In this dataset, directed towards the Galactic Center, the VAST collaboration was on the hunt for 3 long period transient objects. Over a period of 10 hours, ASKAP stared towards this patch of sky, building an exquisite dataset. Imaging of the field, necessary to provide a basis of removing the static sky, was needed – a challenging task towards a field with such complexity and dynamic range. A modified version of wsclean was used in conjunction with iterative clean masking operations to slowly and carefully model the diffuse structure spanning the field. This image represents the final output of this continuum imaging procedure. (Image credit: T. Galvin; ASKAP; CSIRO)