A "winterover" - one of the two staff members who stay through the minus-100-degree Fahrenheit nights of Antarctica's coldest months - hikes underneath the stars and aurora to the South Pole home of IceCube, a UW-Madison-led neutrino telescope. This image by IceCube assistant scientist Yuya Makino was one of the winners of the 2021 Cool Science Image Contest.
Science often goes where our eyes have trouble following, capturing moments too fleeting and objects too small or distant for easy observation with the senses we have on hand. That's where cool science images come in.
To celebrate the exploratory and aesthetic value of the photos, renderings, videos, images, art and more made in the process of fulfilling curiosity and advancing science, the 12th annual Cool Science Image Contest is now soliciting the best visuals from members of the UW-Madison community.
Hundreds of images and videos - depicting animals, insects, plants, cells, stars, weather, nanoscale structures and more - have been entered in the first 11 years of the contest, which is sponsored by Promega Corp. Any visual media produced during the course of research, scholarship or self-guided discovery are welcome.
Previous winners include distinguished scientists who have gone on to win major international image contests, but every year's crop of honorees includes dabblers and relative novices who captured something amazing.
All qualified submissions are featured on university websites and in other UW-Madison communications, and in science outreach and art exhibits on and off campus. Ten winning images and two winning videos are showcased in a fall exhibit at the Mandelbaum and Albert Family Vision Gallery of the McPherson Eye Research Institute, and for a year at Promega's Fitchburg headquarters.
To enter up to three of your cool science images or videos, visit the contest website for guidelines, submission requirements and a link to the entry form. The submission deadline is May 1.
Winners, chosen by a panel of judges with experience in scientific imagery and visual art and storytelling, will be announced in May. Each winning entry receives prizes including a large-format print of the winning submission and will, with other entries, be displayed around campus during science events throughout the year.
