View allAll Photos Tagged magellanicclouds
The Milky Way, including Sagitarius (left), Southern Cross (top) and the two Magellanic clouds float above the Cuttagee Lake Bridge, Far South Coast, NSW, Australia.
An uncropped test image using a Rokinon 8mm lens on a Pentax K1 in crop mode.
My photo today is another from my vault of "I'll get to them someday" shots, captured in December of 2018 near Bodalla, Australia. I remember this being a night when I burned up more time trying to outrun clouds than shooting images of the sky. My efforts weren't all in vain, though. The thin layer of airborne moisture that wafted into the area on my arrival served to enhance the colours of the stars.
To the left of the largest tree, I caught the familiar shape of the Southern Cross. Below and a little to the right, the two "pointers", Alpha and Beta Centauri, are showing more like glowing blobs than the usual pinpricks of light that stars seem to be when we look at the night sky. The Large Magellanic Cloud–the only cloud that I had hoped to see through my viewfinder–is conspicuous in the top right-hand corner of my shot.
The photo is a single-frame image that I took with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4 using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.
Half arch in the south (also known cheekily as my half-arched attempt at a Milky Way panorama).
This stitched image shows the half arch of the Milky Way, looking west to south, in the skies over Tuross Head, on Australia’s south-east coast, back in July. Each of the 40 original frames have been edited to bring out the stars, galactic dust & gas and the lovely green airglow that was visible that night.
Stitched panorama, made up of 40x Canon EOS 6D, Canon 40mm @ f/3.2, 15 sec @ ISO 8000.
While choosing a photo to post today, I spent possibly too much time deciding if I should select this one. I had a feeling that I’d featured these fluffy, floating orbs–the Magellanic Clouds–too many times throughout 2020, and didn’t want to bore anyone. After a quick flick through my published images for the year, I found that this will be only the third time since January that I’ve brought them to you, and I hope that you’ll enjoy another look.
Despite their names, you’re not looking at clouds but two dwarf galaxies that are travelling through space with our Milky Way galaxy, at the relatively close distances of 163,000 light-years and 206,000 light-years from us, respectively. My photo managed to capture them both in the same frame, but that gap between the two irregular dwarf galaxies has been measured at around 75,000 light-years. Southern Hemisphere observers–and some from the lower northern latitudes–can see the Clouds in the night sky, even in light-polluted cities such as the one I live in, Sydney, Australia.
To create this photo, I shot eleven individual images of this part of the sky, then combined (stacked) those in software so that I could reduce the amount of digital signal noise in the scene. For each one of the eleven frames, I used a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.0 using an exposure time of 8.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.
The Southern Lights - Aurora Australis and the Milky Way night sky filled with stars in Blayney, Central West, NSW, Australia.
On the last night of my recent stay at the holiday town of Tuross Head, Australia, I set up one of my cameras to automatically take photos to create a star-trails image (that I’m yet to process and post). While that was happening, I was walking around in the dark, looking for other parts of the sky to photograph. I’d visited this bridge during the day time on a previous trip, so went there again on this night to see how I could use it in a composition.
The Magellanic Clouds–satellite galaxies of our own Milky Way–happened to line up just right over the bridge. The stillness of the water in Bumbo Creek provided a great mirror to reflect starlight from, and a little bit of illumination from an LED lamp helped make the bridge more visible. There was a lovely amount of green atmospheric airglow to provide a pleasant background colour to the scene.
I created this photo by shooting ten overlapping images, then stitching those images into a vertical panorama using some software. For each of the ten individual images I used a Canon EOS 6D camera, fitted with a Rokinon 24mm lens set to f/2.4, and an exposure time of 15 seconds per frame @ ISO 6400.
The rural night sky filled with stars as the Aurora Australis begins in Blayney, Central West, NSW, Australia.
The rural night sky filled with stars as the Aurora Australis begins in Blayney, Central West, NSW, Australia.
Two astronomers taking a break from telescope work, the disused SEST radio telescope, the Milky Way, the Magellanic Clouds, the lights of La Serena and some intense airglow can all be seen in this 360 degree panorama.
The Southern Lights - Aurora Australis and the night sky filled with stars in Blayney, Central West, NSW, Australia.
It’s fairly well known that Sirius, in the constellation Canis Major, is the brightest star visible in the earth’s skies, from either the northern or southern hemispheres. The second-brightest star is Canopus, the most luminous star in the constellation of Carina and about half of the magnitude (stellar brightness) of Sirius.
According to Wikipedia, in Indian Vedic literature Canopus is associated with the sage Agastya, one of the ancient rishis. Agastya, the star, is said to be the 'cleanser of waters' and its rising coincides with the calming of the waters of the Indian Ocean. Perhaps it’s fitting that Canopus is the bright star here rising over the treeline and reflected in the waters of the Kangaroo River. Once cleansed by Canopus this flow heads towards and over the Carrington Falls where the river continues about 150 metres below.
Rising above Canopus are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, respectively. We’re coming into the prime time of year to see these two dwarf galaxies take a lap around the South Celestial Pole. Deep green airglow in the atmosphere gives a lovely tint to the background sky. The river and rocks were lit by bouncing the light from a tungsten-filament lamp off a photographic reflector.
I tried to capture the reflection of Canopus and the Magellanic Clouds in one shot but couldn’t manage it so this shot is made up from six individual and overlapping images that were stitched together using the application Autopano Pro. Each frame was shot with Canon EOS 6D, Rokinon 24mm @ f/2.4, 15 sec @ ISO 6400.
The mouth of the Moore River meets the ocean, well almost. The sand bar does occasionally get breached, allowing the river to flow into the ocean. In this picture the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds hover over the glow of the city of Perth in Western Australia, just over an hour's drive away. It was incredibly windy the entire time I was there which made it hard to capture shots in focus with the camera being buffeted constantly!
Nikon d5100
Tokina 11-16mm @ 11mm
f2.8
ISO 3200
25 seconds
A 360° fish-eye panorama of the southern hemisphere autumn sky, on March 31, 2017, taken from Cape Conran on the Gippsland Coast of Victoria, Australia at a latitude of 37° South. ..Orion and Sirius are at top, oriented as we are used to seeing them in the northern sky in our winter season. Below Sirius is Canopus, and below it are the two Magellanic Clouds, Large and Small (LMC and SMC). At bottom along the southern Milky Way are the stars of Carina, Crux, and Centaurus, and the dark lanes of the Milky Way creating the “Dark Emu” rising out of the ocean. At far left is Jupiter. ..Some faint red airglow tints the sky. ..This is at stitch of 7 segments, each shot with the 14mm Rokinon lens, in portrait orientation, at f/2.5 for 45 seconds each, at ISO 3200 with the Canon 6D. Stitched with PTGui with spherical fish-eye projection. ....
This area was decimated in the 2009 bushfires and it is still recovering. There are still skeletons of gum trees dotted throughout the landscape but it is a beautiful location and nights like these you wouldn't even know!! Bonus, its less than 2 hours from Melbourne and light pollution free.
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10 Portrait Shots stitched together in Lightroom 6.0
14mm - f2.4 - ISO 3200 - 30 sec
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Canon 5DMkIII
Samyang 14mm f2.4 Lens
Really Right Stuff Ball Head
Promediagear Tripod
The dark night sky with The Milky Way Galaxy filled with stars from Blayney, Central West, NSW, Australia.
At 1:00 AM on the 20th february 2018, I stepped outside our hut in fjordland nationalpark to go to the bathroom. When I looked up, I saw the most remarkable night sky, I had ever seen. This was all the more suprising, since the day before and the day after that night, it was raining continuously.
I got my down jacket, my tripod and my camera and started shooting for over an hour. This is the result of two combined images, shot with my Canon 10-22 at 10mm and f/3.5 on my 80D.
To see such a beautiful Aurora Australis in New Zealand during the summer was quite a Jackpot!
The Southern Lights - Aurora Australis and the night sky filled with stars in Blayney, Central West, NSW, Australia.
It’s cloud city here again today so this shot is from one 12 months back (4th December, 2015) when I ventured down to the highlands town of Robertson, on the south-east coast of Australia. This cemetery is actually on a hill and it really was very dark and very quiet. I don’t know how old the grave in this photo is but the cemetery dates back to 1870.
Although it looks like I was lucky enough to catch a meteor as it vaporised in the atmosphere, after looking at the shots immediately before and after this one I found that it was in fact a satellite “flare”. This occurs when a satellite is at just the right altitude and angle to catch and reflect the sun’s light back down to the earth. Up to the left and in line with the satellite’s path is the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy of about 30 million stars that’s around 160,000 light-years from us.
Shot with Canon EOS 6D, Samyang 14mm @ f/4.0, 30 sec @ ISO 3200.
Description: This is a composite Chandra (X-ray/blue) and Hubble (optical/pink & purple) of N132D. The beautiful glowing horseshoe-shaped cloud of hot gas against a backdrop of thousands of stars was produced by the explosion of a massive star. Shock waves produced by the explosion heated interstellar gas around the site to X-ray emitting temperatures of millions of degrees Celsius. The optical image reveals cooler gas and a small, bright crescent-shaped cloud of emission from hydrogen gas. The star that exploded as a supernova was probably more than 20 times as massive as the Sun. Most of the stars in this image are less massive and will not go out with a bang.
Creator/Photographer: Chandra X-ray Observatory
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, which was launched and deployed by Space Shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999, is the most sophisticated X-ray observatory built to date. The mirrors on Chandra are the largest, most precisely shaped and aligned, and smoothest mirrors ever constructed. Chandra is helping scientists better understand the hot, turbulent regions of space and answer fundamental questions about origin, evolution, and destiny of the Universe. The images Chandra makes are twenty-five times sharper than the best previous X-ray telescope. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Medium: Chandra telescope x-ray
Date: 2005
Persistent URL: chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2005/n132d/
Repository: Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
Gift line: X-ray: NASA/SAO/CXC; Optical: NASA
Accession number: n132d
The southern Milky Way with the Dark Emu rising over the OzSky Star Party on April 5, 2016. This is the section of the sky and Milky Way that cannot be seen from northern latitudes.
The Milky Way extends from Puppis and Vela at top to Centaurus at bottom, with Crux and Carina at left of centre with the Southern Cross and the Carina Nebula at centre. The Small and Large Magellanic Clouds are at lower right. The South Celestial Pole is at lower centre. Canopus is the bright star upper right.
The telescopes are from the Three Rivers Foundation Australia for use by visiting amateur astronomers at the annual OzSky Star Party, held on the grounds of the Warrumbungles Motel near Coonabarabran, NSW.
This is a stack of 4 x 5 minute exposures with the Rokinon 14mm lens at f/2.8 and Canon 5D MkII at ISO 1600, all tracked on the iOptron Sky Tracker, plus one 5-minute exposure untracked of the ground to prevent it from blurring. The trees are blurred at the boundary of the two images, tracked and untracked.
Earth's rotation allows the recording of star trails around the South Celestial Pole. Trails in this 10 minute image include the Milky Way in the vicinity of the Southern Cross, together with the Lesser and Greater Magellanic Clouds and other southern stars.
Milky Way, Large and Small Magellanic Clouds over the 3.9 metre Anglo-Australian Telescope (Australian National University), located at Siding Spring Observatory, NSW. Shot on April 15, 2018.
Taken in April, 2018 during the inaugural Astrophotography / iTelescope Masterclass held by Dr. Christian Sasse.
The Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds visible with the naked eye in the Karoo.
You really really should lightbox this or view it large.
The 30 Doradus region lies within the Large Magellenic Cloud (LMC) about 170,000 light years from Earth. It is the nearest HII emission nebula complex outside our galaxy. It's also very large, being about 3000 light years across!
At the core of the bright, spider shaped nebula there is a very luminous cluster of stars called NGC 2070. At the core of that cluster lies R136, an extraordinary cluster of very massive O and B type stars that supplies half the luminosity to 30 Doradus (the designation for the Tarantula nebula and the cluster NGC 2070). Some of the stars in R136 are thought to be as massive as 130 Suns!!
At the right edge of the frame you can see the stars of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
This is a 9.5 hr LHaRGB image (180, 180, 70, 70, 70 mins). LRGB subs were 10 mins and Ha subs were 30 mins, all unbinned. Lum blended into Ha at 33%. Ha was also blended into the red channel at 50% and the blue channel at 15%.
FOV is 1.85 x 1.21 deg @ 1.67 arcsec/pixel.
Takahashi TOA-150 refractor @ F7.3 (FL=1095mm) on a Takahashi EM-400 with SBIG STL 11000M camera.
This image was shot in one of my favourite 'dark sky' locations at Cape Palliser on the bottom of the North Island of New Zealand. It is a panorama made up of 28 individual shots, giving an overall image size of 275 megapixels. The photo shows the Milky Way high in the sky stretching from east to west. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds can be seen below the arch of the Milky Way. These two objects are irregular dwalf galaxies and are only visible from the southern hemisphere. The light below the Milky Way to the left is the Cape Palliser Lighthouse, and the small glow on the horizon to the right is the Queen Mary 2 Cruise Ship en-route for Wellington, New Zealand.
This is one of a pair of photographs that I took of the stars around the South Celestial Pole. The web links (URL's) for the pair are given below. This was a "point star" photograph with an 8 second exposure, whilst the other was a "star trail" photograph with a 34 minute exposure.
As far as the motivation for taking these photographs was concerned, it was almost a case of "because I could". But really, its always both more complicated and simpler than that! The results delight me, disappoint me, surprise me, astonish me, educate me, calm me, ... all at once. I even enjoy the act the taking the photographs - a consequence of the heft and the mechanical controls of my Hasselblad 500C/M camera - born well before the digital era but engineered in such a way that a modern digital back can be used in place of film.
I took a similar pair of photographs at this time of the morning from this location 3 months ago (URL's below). In this timeframe, the stars have appeared to rotate clockwise by 90 degrees. The notable features in the scene are but few when compared with the North Celestial Pole. The brightest star, towards the upper right corner, is Achernar. The smudge one third out from the centre towards 4 o'clock is the Small Magellanic Cloud, whilst the smudge on the other side of the centre towards 10 o'clock is the Large Magellanic Cloud. Both of these are galaxies, composed of dozens of nebulae and star clusters. The building is our apartment block.
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URL's for this pair of point star and star trail photographs (September 2016)...
Point star image on Flickr ...
www.flickr.com/photos/momentsforzen/29592098970/
Star trail image on Flickr ...
www.flickr.com/photos/momentsforzen/29886074935/
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URL's for a previous pair of point star and star trail photographs (June 2016) ...
Point star image on Flickr ...
www.flickr.com/photos/momentsforzen/27092362483/
Star trail image on Flickr ...
www.flickr.com/photos/momentsforzen/27424551430/
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[ Location - Barton, Australian Capital Territory, Australia ]
Photography notes ...
The photograph was taken using the following hardware configuration ...
(Year of manufacture indicated in braces where known.)
- Hasselblad 500C/M body (1994).
- Hasselblad CFV-50c Digital Back for Hasselblad V mount camera.
- Hasselblad Focusing Screen for the CFV-50c digital back, with focusing prism and crop markings.
- Hasselblad 45 Degree Viewfinder PME-45 42297 (2001).
- Hasselblad Carl Zeiss lens - Distagon 40mm f/4 CF T* FLE (1996).
- Hasselblad 93mm 1x HZ-0 Filter.
- Hasselblad 093/40 Hood/Filter holder for 40mm CF, CFE, CFi, CFE IF lenses.
I acquired the photograph (8272 x 6200 pixels) with an ISO of 1600, exposure time of 8 seconds, and aperture of f/4.0
Post-processing ...
Finder - Removed the CF card from the camera digital back and placed it in a Lexar 25-in-1 USB card reader. Then used Finder on my MacBook Air to download the raw image file (3FR extension) from the card.
Lightroom - Imported the 3FR image.
Lightroom - Used the Map module to add the location details to the EXIF header.
Lightroom - Applied various basic lighting and color adjustments in the Develop module. The general processing objectives / strategy that I use with photographs of the night sky is as follows ...
- Adjust the geometry (e.g., perspective, straighten, crop).
- Adjust the White Balance.
- Increase the definition of features.
- Prevent the whites from becoming overexposed.
Lightroom - Specifically ...
Lightroom - In the Develop module, I applied Preset 20160923-003 that represented the settings used to process the companion star trail photograph.
Lightroom - Made various small adjustments to obtain a better lighting and color match to the companion star trail photograph.
Lightroom - Saved the Develop module settings as preset 20160923-012.
Lightroom - Output the image as a JPEG image using the "Maximum" quality option (8272 x 6200 pixels).
PhotoSync - Copied the JPEG file to my iPad Mini for any final processing, review, enjoyment, and posting to social media.
@MomentsForZen #MomentsForZen #MFZ #Hasselblad #500CM #CFV50c #Lightroom #Sky #Night #BlueHour #Stars #SouthCelestialPole #MagellanicCloud #MagellanicClouds #LargeMagellanicCloud #SmallMagellanicCloud #LMC #SMC #Achernar
An uncropped early evening image taken with an IRIX 15mm f2.4 Blackstone lens on a Pentax K1 with Astrotracer.
View to the South from Mimosa Rocks National Park, southern NSW, Australia. The Southern Cross with the conspicuous dark Coal Sack Nebula lies just above the horizon with the two pointers β and α Centaurus to its right. The Greater and Lesser Magellanic clouds dominate the top of the frame, with Canopus to the left of them. The Milky Way extends upwards to the left through Carina and into Canis Major with Sirius peeping through the tree. The bright lights on the far right horizon are part of the coastal village of Tathra.
The Large Magellanic Cloud Central.
Central Region of The Large Magellanic Cloud.
Mosaic Panels: 3
Exposures per mosaic panel: R:5 hours + Ha:5 hours , B:5 hours + OIII: 5 hours (20 hours per tile, 60 hours total)
Total Field Covered: 240 x 130 arcminutes.
Dates: 12th, 13th, 22nd and 23rd November, 2nd, 3rd, 12th and 13th December 2009.
Location: Gold Coast, Queensland.
Processing:
Sub-Image calibration and per-filter colour image sigma rejected addition with CCDStack.
Background correction using the PixInsight software's Dynamic Background Extraction Tool.
Green Synthesis, RGB combination, mosaic assembly, levels and Adobe RGB 1998 colourspace conversion with Adobe Photoshop CS4.
Notes:
This image was an experiment in dealing with light pollution from my site by blending Narrowband filters with RGB and synthesizing Green, usually the most problematic colour.
Using Ha and OIII filters to limit the earthly glows and blending the flat backgrounds from these with standard Red and Blue filters.
For this particular image, being a mosaic, there is approximately 60 hours of exposures here without taking any Green or SII, which would have required another 30 hours of exposures in this case.
In an attempt to limit light pollution influences and also reduce the total amount of time needed to take all the exposures for this three-panel, pseudo RGB image, the Green channel was synthesised from the combined R = R+Ha and B= B+OIII images.
Telescope: Takahashi FSQ106ED
Focal Length: 390mm
Camera: SBIG ST10XE
Pixels: 2184 x 1472 x 6.7um
2010 Royal Observatory Greenwich -Astronomy Photographer of the Year shortlist.
My two-week holiday has ended and I’m back in the big smoke of Sydney, Australia, with the other 5 million or so people who live here. Even though I had cloudy, grey skies for most of my break I’d still rather be back there on the coast! On the last two nights my wife & I drove to Australia’s capital city, Canberra, to play tourist and visit some friends.
One of the friends we visited was Ian Williams (www.facebook.com/ianmwillo) and his family in their Canberra home. On Saturday night Ian took me out to shoot nightscape images in some of the many square kilometres of bushland that’s pretty much on his doorstep. While driving to the spot where this shot was taken I got an alert on my phone, telling me that the ISS (International Space Station) would be passing over us within the hour. Once we were both set up and had worked out our foreground lighting (close enough to each other so we wouldn’t lose contact but far enough apart to not wash out each other’s shots) NASA was kind enough to have the largest man-made object in space do its thing and orbit right over us.
The ISS made its pass in the part of the sky where the Magellanic Clouds were hanging in the darkness. The dry air made for very clear seeing and my little Manfrotto “Lumimuse” LED lamp did nicely at lighting up the gum tree in the foreground. Over at the lower left the Southern Cross and the dark “Coal Sack” nebula are at about the 7:30 position on the sky. To the right of the Small Magellanic Cloud is the globular cluster 47 Tucanae.
This single frame was shot with Canon EOS 6D, Rokinon 24mm @ f/2.4, 15 second exposure @ ISO 6400.
A shining cloud lit by the Villarrica lights faces the Magellanic Clouds..
This picture was taken in Ñancul, 6 km outside Villarrica, Región de la Araucanía, Chile.
Technical Parameters:
30 s / ISO 1250 / f2,8 / 14 mm
Post-production:
Camera Raw 6.7 and Adobe Photoshop CS5