View allAll Photos Tagged magellanicclouds
The very bright Tarantula Nebula (also known as 30 Doradus or the Doradus Nebula) is an H II region in the very dense Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The Tarantula Nebula is the most active starburst region known in the Local Group of Galaxies.
About this image:
This wide field image consists of 14 x 2 minute exposures at ISO 6400. Photographed in the rural dark skies of the Karoo (Northern Cape, South Africa).
About the Star Colors:
You will notice that star colors differ from red, orange and yellow, to blue. This is an indication of the temperature of the star's Nuclear Fusion process. This is determined by the size and mass of the star, and the stage of its life cycle. In short, the blue stars are hotter, and the red ones are cooler.
Gear:
GSO 6" f/4 Imaging Newtonian Reflector Telescope.
Baader Mark-III MPCC Coma Corrector.
Astronomik CLS Light Pollution Filter.
Orion StarShoot Autoguider.
Aurora Flatfield Panel.
Celestron AVX Mount.
Celestron StarSense.
Canon 60Da DSLR.
Tech:
Guiding in Open PHD 2.6.1.
Image acquisition in Sequence Generator Pro.
Lights/Subs: 14 x 120 sec. ISO 6400 CFA FIT Files.
Calibration Frames:
50 x Bias
30 x Darks
20 x Flats
Pre-Processing and Linear workflow in PixInsight,
and finished in Photoshop.
Astrometry Info:
nova.astrometry.net/user_images/1191958#annotated
RA, Dec center: 84.5358996211, -69.1714612158 degrees
Orientation: 1.16214860863 deg E of N
Pixel scale: 6.80102321917 arcsec/pixel
Martin
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The Southern Lights - Aurora Australis and the night sky filled with stars in Blayney, Central West, NSW, Australia.
Today’s NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week features a dusty yet sparkling scene from one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud. The Large Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy situated about 160 000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa.
Despite being only 10–20% as massive as the Milky Way galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud contains some of the most impressive star-forming regions in the nearby Universe. The scene pictured here is on the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula, the largest and most productive star-forming region in the local Universe. At its center, the Tarantula Nebula hosts the most massive stars known, which weigh in at roughly 200 times the mass of the Sun.
The section of the nebula shown here features serene blue gas, brownish-orange dust patches and a sprinkling of multicoloured stars. The stars within and behind the dust clouds appear redder than those that are not obscured by dust. Dust absorbs and scatters blue light more than red light, allowing more of the red light to reach our telescopes and making the stars appear redder than they are. This image incorporates ultraviolet and infrared light as well as visible light. Using Hubble observations of dusty nebulae in the Large Magellanic Cloud and other galaxies, researchers will study these distant dust grains, helping to understand the role that cosmic dust plays in the formation of new stars and planets.
[Image Description: A section of a nebula, made up of layers of coloured clouds of gas, of varying thickness. In the background are bluish, translucent and wispy clouds; on top of these are stretches of redder and darker, clumpy dust, mostly along the bottom and right. In the bottom left corner are some dense bars of dust that block light and appear black. Small stars are scattered across the nebula.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray; CC BY 4.0
The southern sky splendours over the OzSky Star Party, with the Milky Way from Vela to Centaurus, including Crux and Carina left of upper centre. The Large Magellanic Cloud is at lower right below Canopus.
This section of sky contains a large number of the splendours of the southern hemisphere sky.
This is a single tracked 2-minute exposure with the Rokinon 14mm lens at f/2.8 and Canon 5D MkII at ISO 2500.
Only a minute or two before I took this photo, the moon had started to make its appearance for the night. Although not yet clear of the horizon, the Earth’s silvery companion-in-space was already beginning to brighten the sky with its light.
The Milky Way’s core was very low on the southwestern horizon when I shot this scene. I had quite a few shots of that part of the sky already “in the can”, so opted to snap off a few frames with the Magellanic Clouds featured over this old stone church. The stones are old, for sure, with locals having completed the building in 1859. I but I think I’m right in guessing, though, that the plastic water tank and corrugated metal roof might not be of the same vintage as the bulk of the structure.
This photo is a single-frame image that I captured using a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 6400.
An old mining rig shaft under the night sky with milky way. Poppethead Reserve is a Regional Park. The site is the historic Poppethead of the Aberdare Central Colliery at Kitchener, near Cessnock, in the Hunter Valley, NSW, Australia.
With our city of Sydney, Australia currently in lockdown due to the COVID-19 Delta variant, I find it liberating to look at my night-sky photos. The images are a reminder that I’ll be back out under the stars once again–hopefully soon–breathing the fresh country air and appreciating how good life can be.
I shot this photo of the ghostly remnant of a gum tree–an Australian eucalypt–under the Magellanic Cloud galaxies when I stayed at Tuross Head, New South Wales, back in early June. The purplish tinge of the atmospheric airglow that was prominent in the sky on the night provided a lovely backdrop for the blue-white wisps of light known as the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds. If you look at the sky over the top-left half of the tree, you can see some dark patches punctuating the brighter background. These disturbances are caused by a phenomenon known as gravity waves, which are not to be confused with the more enigmatic “gravitational waves” that were first detected in 2015.
Today’s photo is a single-frame image that I shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 6400.
Portrayed in this image from ESA’s Planck satellite are the two Magellanic Clouds, among the nearest companions of our Milky Way galaxy. The Large Magellanic Cloud, about 160 000 light-years away, is the large red and orange blob close to the centre of the image. The Small Magellanic Cloud, some 200 000 light-years from us, is the vaguely triangular-shaped object to the lower left.
At around ten and seven billion times the mass of our Sun, respectively, these are classed as dwarf galaxies. As a comparison, the Milky Way and another of its neighbours, the Andromeda galaxy, boast masses of a few hundred billion solar masses each.
The Magellanic Clouds are not visible from high northern latitudes and were introduced to European astronomy only at the turn of the 16th century. However, they were known long before by many civilisations in the southern hemisphere, as well as by Middle Eastern astronomers.
Planck detected the dust between the stars pervading the Magellanic Clouds while surveying the sky to study the cosmic microwave background – the most ancient light in the Universe – in unprecedented detail. In fact, Planck detected emission from virtually anything that shone between itself and the cosmic background at its sensitive frequencies.
These foreground contributions include many galaxies, near and far, as well as interstellar material in the Milky Way. Astronomers need to remove them in order to access the wealth of cosmic information contained in the ancient light. But, as a bonus, they can use the foreground observations to learn more about how stars form in galaxies, including our own.
Interstellar dust from the diffuse medium that permeates our Galaxy can be seen as the mixture of red, orange and yellow clouds in the upper part of this image, which belong to a large star-forming complex in the southern constellation, Chameleon.
In addition, a filament can also be seen stretching from the dense clouds of Chameleon, in the upper left, towards the opposite corner of the image.
Apparently located between the two Magellanic Clouds as viewed from Planck, this dusty filament is in fact much closer to us, only about 300 light-years away. The image shows how well this structure is aligned with the galaxy’s magnetic field, which is represented as the texture of the image and was estimated from Planck’s measurements.
By comparing the structure of the magnetic field and the distribution of interstellar dust in the Milky Way, scientists can study the relative distribution of interstellar clouds and the ambient magnetic field. While in the case of the filamentary cloud portrayed in this image, the structure is aligned with the direction of the magnetic field, in the denser clouds where stars form filaments tend to be perpendicular to the interstellar magnetic field.
The lower right part of the image is one of the faintest areas of the sky at Planck’s frequencies, with the blue hues indicating very low concentrations of cosmic dust. Similarly, the eddy-like structure of the texture is caused primarily by instrument noise rather than by actual features in the magnetic field.
The emission from dust is computed from a combination of Planck observations at 353, 545 and 857 GHz, whereas the direction of the magnetic field is based on Planck polarisation data at 353 GHz. The image spans about 40º.
Credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration
The southern Milky Way over the beach at Smoky Cape, NSW, Australia, looking into Hat Head National Park. I shot this from the back garden of the Smoky Cape Lighthouse, April 28, 2016, looking south toward the Magellanic Clouds and the main section of the southern Milky Way. The Southern Cross is at upper left; Orion is setting at far right. Sirius is at right and Canopus at centre. The lights on the horizon are from Kempsey. Sky colouration is from light pollution and from airglow.
The sky is from a single 1-minute exposure at f/2.8 with the 15mm lens and Canon 6D at ISO 3200, untracked. The ground is from a mean combine stack of four 1-minute exposures to smooth noise in the foreground where it is more noticeable than in a starry sky.
The beams from the lighthouse were sweeping across the scene as I took these exposures but the long exposures and fast motion of the beams blurred them out of visibility. They are lighting the hills. Foreground illumination is from house lights and a yard light.
The 'tail' of the core is seen rising above the ranges, the full core wasn't visible yet for another few hours, which of course I had to get up again for that morning.
Also seen in this photo are the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Crux or, as we call it in Australia, The Southern Cross.
Nikon d5100
30 seconds
f2.8
ISO 3200
11mm
The Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds over the UT4 telescope at Paranal Observatory in Chile. Vertical mosaic of four landscape pictures. Canon 6D + Rokinon 24mm f/2, 30 secs, ISO 6400
The night sky and rural landscape with Milky Way, Magellanic Clouds and graveyard at Broke in the Hunter Region, NSW, Australia.
A trip out to Mudgee, for an evening shooting the stars with the Canon Collective
Our outer spiral arm & the 2 galaxies known as the Magellanic Clouds. Only seen in the Southern Hemisphere, so come on down!!
A close up to the Tarantula
The diagonal line in the image is either a shooting star or a passing-by satellite, I wish I knew. And of course, the subject of the photo is the gorgeous blue spider.
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Un acercamiento a la Tarántula
La línea diagonal en la imagen es o una estrella fugaz o un satélite que pasaba. Quisiera saber cuál fue. Y por supuesto, el sujeto de la foto es la hermosa araña azul.
The Milky Way night sky filled with stars, light cloud and a hint of the Southern Aurora in Blayney, Central West, NSW, Australia.
The Milky Way Starlit Sky with clouds and Small Magellanic Cloud in Blayney, Central West, NSW, Australia.
A trip out to Mudgee, for an evening shooting the stars with the Canon Collective
The Milky Way & the Large Magellanic Cloud... Feeling small yet?
The Magellanic Clouds behind Auxiliary Telescope 3 at Paranal, with some rather intense airglow. Red airglow is emitted via the rotation & vibration of hydroxyl molecules in the atmosphere. It's not visible to the naked eye, but it does show up in pictures and astronomical data.
The Southern Lights - Aurora Australis and the night sky filled with stars in Blayney, Central West, NSW, Australia.
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.
This frames the Australian aboriginal "Dark Emu" made of dark dust lanes in the Milky Way as it rises in the east. The spectacular southern reaches of the Milky Way from Centaurus to Carina shine above high in the south, including the Southern Cross. The dark Coal Sack beside the Cross is the head of the Emu. Her neck is the dark lane that splits the Milky Way starting at the star Alpha Centauri and extending down and into Scorpius, here rising above the trees.
The faint Zodiacal Band is visible at left. The two Magellanic Clouds are setting at right.
This is a blend of four tracked exposures for the sky and one for the ground, all two minutes at ISO 1600 with the TTArtisan 11mm full-frame fish-eye lens on the filter modified Canon EOS R camera, on the old iOptron SkyTracker. The camera was equipped with an Astronomik clip-in UV/IR Cut filter which when used with this lens actually reduces its off-axis aberrations.
Taken late at night on March 10/11, 2024 at the Warrumbungles Mountain Motel near Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia, during the OzSky star party. The red light is from my other camera rig taking panorama images of the Milky Way.
For this image I reduced the stars to emphasize the Milky Way and dark lanes, using RC-Astro StarXterminator, and an Apply Image function to create a "stars only" layer to blend back in selectiively using a luminosity mask, to reduce the profusion of faint stars but retain the brightest stars.
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.
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. One was a "point star" photograph with an 8 second exposure, whilst this was a "star trail" photograph with a 34 minute exposure.
See the description for the other photograph for more background information etc.
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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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[ 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 100, exposure time of 34 minutes, and aperture of f/11.0
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 - Saved the Develop module settings as preset 20160923-003.
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 #StarTrails #SouthCelestialPole #MagellanicCloud #MagellanicClouds #LargeMagellanicCloud #SmallMagellanicCloud #LMC #SMC #Achernar
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.
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