Hi everyone,
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Astronomy not only provides food for thought, it’s often a feast for the eyes too.
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The beautiful image above was captured by a group of five French amateur astronomers who call themselves “Ciel Austral” or “Southern Sky.” It’s the fruit of a lot of hard work. The team took thousands of images from July 2017 to February 2019 and stitched them together to create a high-resolution panorama that’s 204 megapixels (14,400 x 14,200 pixels) in size. Here’s a close-up of just one tiny region:
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The team owns and operates a small remote-controlled observatory in Chile, home to some of the best skies in the world. They used a 160-mm refracting telescope to take nearly 4,000 individual exposures – 620 gigabytes of data – that were combined to produce the final image. The total time spent recording light – essentially how long the camera shutter remained open – was a whopping 1,060 hours.
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The image isn’t just some random piece of sky. It’s centered on the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way located about 160,000 light years away. The photo reveals the galaxy’s elongated shape along with a multitude of swirling regions of glowing gas that are illuminated by newborn stars embedded within them like butterflies in a cocoon. The largest of these regions, known as the Tarantula Nebula, is nearly a thousand light-years across and has given birth to more than a million stars.
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If you’d like to know more, you’ll find additional information here!
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And if you speak “la belle langue” you can find more information about the observatory and the team on their website.
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You can also click your way around a zoomable high-resolution version of the image here.
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As the great New England poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.” Enjoy!
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Best regards,
Michael
Michael
 Dr. Michael West is Lowell Observatory’s Deputy Director for Science. Follow his AstroAlerts to receive breaking news stories from the world of astronomy, odd bits of astronomical lore, and information about upcoming astronomical events. You can reach him at mwest@lowell.edu.
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