These hyperreal photos may look like the snippets of a dream your laptop might have while dozing off in Photoshop but they’re actually real pictures taken by the entrants in this year’s Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition.

“Searing hot loops of plasma radiate from the edge of the sun, star trails illuminate the night sky over a campfire-lit Green Lake in the Hoover Wilderness of California, Comet Lovejoy sails through the solar system in a green haze leaving cometary dust in its wake… Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2015 has received more outstanding pictures than ever before,” says the official blurb and you can tell from the photos scattered about this post that they aren’t wrong.

If you’ve ever tried to take a halfway decent photo of a starry sky, or even use your iPhone camera in the most basic sense at night, you’ll know how hard it must have been to take these images.