September 2009

Orion's Deep Field - Belt and sword

Posted: September 19th, 2009

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When a friend of mine saw the image I took of Orion's belt he was quick to suggest "Why don't you build a mosaic with this image and the one of the Horsehead and M42 you took last winter?". And I thought "That's an EXCELLENT idea!"After a bit of work putting the mosaic together, here's the result: a beautiful panorama of an area of the constellation of Orion that is anything but usual, almost resembling a true stellar landscape, from the 3 famous stars of the belt to M42.

This image was selected as NASA's Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD) on September 28th, 2009 and on February 12th, 2012. It's the first of my images being selected twice for the APOD.

It also won the first Deep Sky price for the 2010 Best Astrophotographer of the Year, by the Royal Observatory of Greenwich.

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Orion's belt

Posted: September 18th, 2009

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I spent the nights of Thursday 17~Saturday 19 at CalStar 2009, an annual Star Party that takes place at Lake San Antonio in California, a site that although it isn't high at all (900 feet) it has pretty decent dark skies.

I spent each of the three nights after 3am on this field that surprisingly is not very commonly photographed. If you cannot recognize these three stars, you must live in a place that's always cloudy in winter, as they are visible even from very light polluted skies :-)

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Milky Way, east to west

Posted: September 18th, 2009

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The image you see above is a mosaic of 10 different frames, each of them was acquired with either 5x5 minutes (around the Milky Way) or 5x3-4 minutes for the rest of the sky. The horizons are superimposed from two 3x1' shots, but they match both what was there and the orientation.

It's interesting to note that when I started shooting at the Sagittarius area, the Pleiades weren't even above the horizon, but by the time I've got to that part of the sky, they were already all the way up there.

Now, for the fun part, if you mouse over the image, you will see a digitally altered image of what our eyes could see that night, more or less. If you move the mouse out of the image, you see what the camera could catch. The idea is for those who have never seen the Milky Way from a very dark site, to give them an idea of what it would look like - so maybe they get excited about visiting a dark site and enjoy the night sky!

Have you ever been to a very dark site? I'd like to hear what you think. Do you see the image of the "visual" Milky Way too bright compared to what you see at a very dark site? Too dark? Perhaps the image is too "glowy"? Not enough contrast? Please let me know in the comments below!

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The Pleiades (M45)

Posted: September 17th, 2009

Most classic images of M45 - also known as The Pleiades or the Seven Sisters - tend to capture the blueish reflected dust of this famous cluster. However, the region of our galaxy in this direction also has the typical reddish hydrogen gas emission. Also, some dust doesn't reflect the light from the stars so strongly, so it acquires a grayish hue. This widefield image, captured during CalStar'09, shows this peculiar dance of dust and gas, easily differentiated by their colors.

This image was selected as NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day on October 14th, 2009

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