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Southern Splendor

I am always astonished by how much detail I can capture under good conditions from the flight deck of an airliner in cruise.

 

This image shows the splendor of the southern hemisphere sky captured from the flight deck of a Boeing 777-300ER at 35'000 feet over Brazil, during one of my flights to São Paulo in August.

 

The upper part of the image is dominated by the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). This irregular barred spiral galaxy was long considered to be gravitationally bound to our Milky Way. Measurements with the Hubble Space Telescope, announced in 2006 (Nitya Kallivayalil et al.), however suggest the LMC may be moving too fast to be orbiting the Milky Way. Even more recent studies (Marius Cautun et al. 2019) on the other hand, found a much larger dark matter mass than expected. They predict this will eventually reverse the moving direction of the LMC and result in a merger with our Milky Way in 1.5 billion years.

 

In this image, the LMC is flanked on the left side by Canopus, the second brightest star in the sky and on the right side by the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), an irregular dwarf galaxy, whose gravitational bond to our Milky Way is unclear as well.

 

On lower left of the sky, you can see the Milky Way in the constellation Carina, with the prominent pink Eta Carinae Nebula, several beautiful open star clusters and some dark nebulae. These dark nebulae extend to the Chamaeleon Molecular Cloud Complex in the lower center of the image.

 

Prints available: ralf-rohner.pixels.com/featured/southern-splendor-ralf-ro...

 

EXIF

Canon EOS-R, astro-modified

Sigma 28mm f/1.4 ART @ f/2

Mount: Boeing 777-300ER

Sky:

Stack of 12x 5s @ ISO12800

Foreground:

Single exposure from the sky sequence

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Uploaded on October 24, 2022
Taken on September 3, 2022