October 16, 2006
Orion's underpants
I subscribe to the RSS feed for Astronomy Picture of the Day, an archive of astro porn updated daily. Today's shot was a magnificent widefield pic showing the vast orion molecular cloud, tying the horsehead and "great" Orion nebula together. This massive bloom of velvety redness, approximately in the region of the Hunter's jockeys, is magnificent for the fact that it is very faint, and must have required a large number of painstaking exposures (ok, pun intended) to reveal.
Most amazing of all, the picture was assembled by an amateur. Admittedly, he must be a pretty wealthy (and devoted) amateur.
Sally and I have taken an interest in astrophotography, the perfect marriage (hoho) of my interest in astronomy and her interest in photography. On our recent holiday to Tekapo, we took our first pic of the night sky, a portrait of the constellations Sagittarius and Scoprius:
Ok, so it doesn't do justice to the amazingly clear vault of creation that is visible at Tekapo, far from polluting city lights. I swear, out there with the dark dustlanes of the milky way so clear, and seeming close enough to touch, you really get in touch with your local universe. This photo was a two-minute exposure at ISO200. The blurriness is caused my the motion of the earth in its rotation. Well, it at least differentiates the colours of the stars nicely, so it's a triumph of spectroscopy, if not a subtle portrait of that mighty structure, the Galactic Core.
The great thing about amateur astrophotography is that you really don't need a big telescope to reveal the glory of heaven, just a camera with the shutter open long enough for the light to percolate down on to the film (or CCD). Even covering large arcs of sky, a long exposure can reveal a lot of detail and majesty. And the good thing is that it keeps astronomy in the human dimension. You too could see this sort of thing if your eyes could accumulate images over time...
Posted by stuart at October 16, 2006 9:36 PM