Cassiopeia, The W
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When I was a kid, the first constellation that called my attention wasn't
Orion or the Big Dipper. It was Cassiopeia, the "W", and I would immediately
go look for it and recognize it. Cassiopeia wasn't my early call into
astronomy, but for a while it was the only reason for me to look up at the
night sky from a light polluted city in southern Spain "Look, there's
Cassiopeia!"... Well, maybe it was some sort of an early call...
This past week, during four different outings at three different sites and around 550 more miles in my SUV, I managed to capture this beautiful
"starscape".
There's no better way to (hopefully) enjoy this image but at the largest
resolution possible. And while the large image linked above is over 5600 pixels
wide, it is still 1/2 of its original resolution, but I felt I had to reduce
its size to avoid producing a JPEG over 12mb even at 55% quality (which is
already quite degraded). The large image linked above weights almost 6mb (that's at 60%
quality), so if you have a slow connection, be aware of that.
It's not a picture of some gorgeous and
prominent celestial structures such as nebulae, galaxies, etc. but it's
a very special image for me. I hope you enjoy it!
I find it's rather interesting to surf
around the image looking for star clusters, and of course, there are
plenty of them. Some people may feel that the Gamma Cas and Pacman
nebulae could have been selectively processed to become more prominent,
or perhaps more detailed, but although any field swarmed by stars can get in
the way of other features and often times our goal is to give way to the
dust or gas rather than the stars, I think it's obvious that the stars and
nothing else are indeed the protagonist of this image.. Why let anything
else steal the show?
