Selection Criteria
Occasionally, technical excellence may be traded for originality, composition, or special events
1. Overview
Why we curate, and where we want the works to go.
iStarShooter’s “Daily Photo”, “Remote Daily Photo”, “Promoted”, “Top Pick” and “Featured” (collectively “Daily Photo & Featured”) aim to showcase beautiful, interesting, unusual or educational astrophotography, with an emphasis on technical excellence.
Note: A selected work should generally demonstrate excellence in some form (capture, processing, or other aspects). There can be exceptions when technical excellence is exchanged for other qualities (originality, composition, special events or conditions). Even then, the work should maintain a high technical standard.
2. Principles
A shared baseline so human review stays restrained, respectful and consistent.
- “Daily Photo & Featured” is not a contest: there are no prizes, and the goal is not to decide whether one image is better than another or whether one astrophotographer is superior.
- The primary goal is to promote amateur astrophotography so more people can fall in love with astronomy and astrophotography.
- A secondary goal is to encourage excellence: astrophotography is a highly technical hobby with a steep learning curve, and everyone has room to improve.
- We do not wish to represent ourselves in a way that discriminates against photographers or their work. Behind every image there may be immense effort; both photographers and their works deserve respect.
- To avoid remote deep-sky works overwhelming field deep-sky works, iStarShooter separates remote and field categories for display and voting on both user and judge tools.
3. Standards
Rules of thumb: breakable, but they help the team stay aligned.
- Poor stars: trails, elongated stars, out of focus, donut rings, bloating, etc.
- Over-sharpening: fringes on planetary edges or embossed deep-sky structures.
- Calibration defects, often near edges and corners.
- Insufficient integration time leading to obvious grain.
- Over-denoising that wipes out fine details.
- Overuse of Topaz NR creating fake “structure” or invented Hubble-like details.
- Over-saturated colors or banding.
- Insufficient background correction: gradients, light pollution or vignetting.
- Clipped highlights or blacks; the sky should not be rendered as pure black.
- Other issues: poor panel matching, misalignment, bad stitching in mosaics.
- Originality: a new subject, a new perspective, or a novel processing style.
- Does it tell or illustrate a story or a unique scientific event?
- Is the composition thoughtful, considering context and background rather than centering the subject by default?
- Is the framing clean, without careless cut-offs near the edges?
- Are colors harmonious: pleasing narrowband palettes, or accurate LRGB colors?
4. Tiered workflow
Why tiers exist: faster screening, fewer misses, and more stable outcomes for outstanding works.
Every June and December, we openly recruit a new cohort of junior judges via WeChat and QQ group announcements.
Mid-level and senior judges are promoted from Level 1 based on KPI performance over the past six months.
Screen all uploads (Equipment Showcase, Landscape & Human, and Other).
Only remove clearly low-quality, off-topic, or casual snapshots.
A work is eliminated only after at least three junior “reject” votes; works without enough votes after one day move on to mid-level review.
Vote on junior winners; reaching the promotion threshold grants the Featured tag and pushes the work to senior judges.
Works reaching the elimination threshold are removed and receive no tag.
Score Featured works on a 10-point scale; once the scorer count threshold is met, statistics are triggered.
Works meeting the Top Pick average score threshold receive the Top Pick tag; Daily Photo level works enter the Daily Photo queue.
If the score is below the Top Pick threshold, the work is eliminated.
Daily Photo level works do not naturally occur at exactly one per day, so all qualifying works enter a queue first.
A curator selects one per day using rotation rules (category rotation, avoid consecutive wins by the same subject/photographer, newcomer priority, etc.).
5. Special rules for Daily Photo
Designed to keep diversity and prevent repetitive runs of similar content.
- In principle, the same photographer should not win Daily Photo consecutively within the same category, unless there are no alternative candidates.
- For deep-sky and widefield categories, works of the same object or very similar framing should not win consecutively; consider staggered uploads.
- Daily Photo is selected in rotating categories; if a category has no candidates that day, it is skipped to the next.
6. FAQ
Common questions: why does something you dislike sometimes win?
Some selected works don’t look that good. Why?＋
Selections are made by time-limited volunteers, mostly amateur astronomy enthusiasts rather than professionals. Personal preference is inevitable.
There is no fully objective and indisputable metric for whether an image deserves “Daily Photo/Featured”. Winners often align with popular styles or feel more eye-catching.
Also, the goal is not only “better vs worse” but “showcasing and communicating” different kinds of excellence to a wider audience.
My work is better than the recent winners, but it didn’t win. Why?＋
A human-driven system can’t be decisive: works may be missed, or judges may simply like something less than you do.
Only one Daily Photo is published per day, and the selection process can take over a week; “recent results” are not necessarily competing with your upload in the same time window.
Aesthetics: why voting?＋
Voting balances different aesthetic preferences and is a pragmatic way to keep outcomes closer to a broader consensus.
No mechanism can satisfy everyone; we encourage judges to look for strengths, especially for newcomers and difficult shoots.
Blind review: can judges see the author?＋
Judges cannot directly see author identity during voting to reduce bias.
Descriptions, equipment info and shooting parameters provided by the author are shown as references.
Difficulty: do environment and equipment matter?＋
Light pollution, access difficulty and equipment limits can be considered especially at the Featured level, and we encourage supportive choices for newcomers and difficult works.
Long-term high-volume reviewing can cause aesthetic fatigue; we regularly remind judges to keep standards reasonable. Remote and field works are also separated to protect field astrophotography motivation.
Daily Photo, Remote Daily Photo and Promoted: are they the same tier?＋
They can be seen as a similar tier with the same goal: to find the best works within a batch or period.
This tier tends to be more picky, but still relies on voting. Usually we don’t consider environment/equipment difficulty here (remote and field are still separated).