The Night Sky 3

[wishbone]

My son's latest photo taken last tuesday night at the usual dark sky site in wild Wales...if I was feeling better I'd have gone with him. I think you'll agree that it's a stunning image of the Orion Nebula and worth the 100 mile round trip. He's recently upgraded his equipment (talk about toys for the boys!) hence it's a more detailed image than the previous two I posted.

[JoParis]

Wow, that's amazing!

[popsmith1874]

Cracking photo 👍

[kkminton]

Oh how lovely.... thank you for sharing

[nomoreheels]

Magnificent. Thank you for posting this.

Where we lived in Spain we had no light pollution & saw some wonderful night skies, unfortunately nothing pictured as well as this but we hadn't invested in the equipment your son obviously has. We saw shooting stars galore, some were so bright even if you were inside & not looking for them you'd catch them in the corner of your eye & they'd draw you outside for the show. I miss that.

[wishbone in reply to nomoreheels]

I bet you did! Far better conditions for stargazing there than cloudy damp wet Wales where we live.

[Matilda_1922]

It’s an amazing shot of the sky. Thank you for showing this

[Ruth12345]

How lovely. Must have been wonderful to see.

[wishbone in reply to Ruth12345]

The Orion Nebula is visible with the naked eye as a small smudge fairly low down in the southern sky when seen from the UK. Even when viewed through a large telescope it is nowhere near as impressive as in the photo. I'm not well clued up on astrophotography, but to obtain these sort of images my son uses a DSLR camera attached to a small telescope which is mounted on a motorised guidance system that tracks the object being photographed, ie...it keeps precise timing with the Earth's rotation so whatever's being photographed stays accurately positioned in the camera's field of view. This allows a number of photographs to be taken...I believe my son did 24x90 second exposures for this one, which he then uploads to his PC. No idea what he does after that to obtain the resulting image, but whatever it is it seems to work ok.

I ain't the best when it comes to explaining this sort of stuff, so hope the above's not too difficult to decipher....tough luck if it is though!

[Hidden in reply to wishbone]

Oh i don't know, if i understood it you did pretty well 😃 It is an absolutely beautiful photograph

[Padram]

Wow, what a beauty !!!

[Stm252]

Gorgeous!!

[Mmrr]

fabulous !

[ripecherries]

Stunning photo. Thanks for posting.

[Damaged]

That is truly beautiful image. Well done 👍

[Ruth12345]

Thank you wishbone the explanation was great. Not sure how much I understand, but its very interesting

[wishbone in reply to Ruth12345]

Thanks Ruth...I do try! I think the main thing I wanted to get over is that even viewed through a large telescope you will not see anywhere near the amount of detail or colour as you can in the above image of the Orion Nebula. Same goes for most things in the night sky such as galaxies and star clusters. It's all down to the modern techniques of multiple long exposure photography and black arts of computer wizardry. Also a certain amount of savvy on how to obtain a good photo as not all of them turn out as good as this one.

My son is well chuffed. Since my initial post the manufacturers of the small telescope he recently bought for his astrophotograpy, and which he used for this photo, has seen the photo online and asked his permission to show it on their website as an example of what their telescopes are capable of in the hands of a beginner.

[Ruth12345]

Wow, that sounds impressive. Good for him

[wishbone in reply to Ruth12345]

Yes it does, but I'm not going to say much to him about it as it'll only go to his head!