View allAll Photos Tagged smallmagellaniccloud
The disk of the Milky Way Galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), and VLT UT 3 and 4.
30-sec, ISO 1600 | Nikon D700 + 14-24mm f/2.8G | Paranal Observatory, Chile, 23 Aug 2009
© 2009 José Francisco Salgado, PhD
Watch video, UT3 & 4 and The Milky Way - I, The LMC and SMC at Dawn.
2011 Mar 02: 5,000 views
2012 Nov 17: 8,000 views
The Small Magellanic Cloud (NGC 292) visible from the southern hemisphere, a companion/satellite galaxy of our Milkyway 203,000LY away.
Exposed in LRGB with H-Alpha and OIII color at 150mm focal length through an Sigma 150mm f2.8 prime lens, QHY268M camera, guided with a 80mm refractor at 500mm FL and tracked on a hypertuned CGEM mount.
The 15% narrowband data screened over the LRGB image emphasises the nebulosity within the satellite galaxy.
Total exposure time was 19 hours and 4 minutes.
Beach camping at Teewah (Double Island Point) looking back towards Noosa. 4WD access only.
Also visible are the small and large Magellanic clouds.
Astronomers have been bemused to find young stars spiralling into the centre of a massive cluster of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The outer arm of the spiral in this huge, oddly shaped stellar nursery – called NGC 346 – may be feeding star formation in a river-like motion of gas and stars. This is an efficient way to fuel star birth, researchers say.
The Small Magellanic Cloud has a simpler chemical composition than the Milky Way, making it similar to the galaxies found in the younger Universe, when heavier elements were more scarce. Because of this, the stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud burn hotter and so run out of their fuel faster than in our Milky Way. Though a proxy for the early universe, at 200 000 light-years away the Small Magellanic Cloud is also one of our closest galactic neighbours.
Learning how stars form in the Small Magellanic Cloud offers a new twist on how a firestorm of star birth may have occurred early in the history of the Universe, when it was undergoing a 'baby boom' about two to three billion years after the Big Bang (the Universe is now 13.8 billion years old).
The new results show that the process of star formation there is similar to that in our own Milky Way.
Only 150 light-years in diameter, NGC 346 boasts the mass of 50 000 Suns. Its intriguing shape and rapid star formation rate have puzzled astronomers. It took the combined power of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to unravel the behaviour of this mysterious-looking stellar nesting ground.
“Stars are the machines that sculpt the Universe. We would not have life without stars, and yet we don’t fully understand how they form,” explained study leader Elena Sabbi of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “We have several models that make predictions, and some of these predictions are contradictory. We want to determine what is regulating the process of star formation, because these are the laws that we need to also understand what we see in the early Universe.”
Researchers determined the motion of the stars in NGC 346 in two different ways. Using Hubble, Sabbi and her team measured the changes in the stars’ positions over 11 years. The stars in this region are moving at an average velocity of 3200 kilometres per hour, which means that in 11 years they move 320 billion kilometres. This is about twice the distance between Earth and the Sun.
But this cluster is relatively far away, inside a neighbouring galaxy. This means the observed motion is very small and therefore difficult to measure. These extraordinarily precise observations were possible only because of Hubble’s exquisite resolution and high sensitivity. Also, Hubble’s three-decade-long history of observations provides a baseline for astronomers to follow minute celestial motions over time.
The second team, led by Peter Zeidler of AURA/STScI for the European Space Agency, used the ground-based VLT’s Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument to measure radial velocity, which determines whether an object is approaching or receding from an observer.
“What was really amazing is that we used two completely different methods with different facilities and basically we came to the same conclusion independently,” said Zeidler. “With Hubble, you can see the stars, but with MUSE we can also see the gas motion in the third dimension, and it confirms the theory that everything is spiralling inwards.”
But why a spiral?
“A spiral is really the good, natural way to feed star formation from the outside towards the centre of the cluster,” explained Zeidler. “It’s the most efficient way that stars and gas fuelling more star formation can move towards the centre.”
Half of the Hubble data for this study of NGC 346 is archival. The first observations were taken 11 years ago. They were recently repeated to trace the motion of the stars over time. Given the telescope’s longevity, the Hubble data archive now contains more than 32 years of astronomical data, powering unprecedented, long-term studies.
“The Hubble archive is really a gold mine,” said Sabbi. “There are so many interesting star-forming regions that Hubble has observed over the years. Given that Hubble is performing so well, we can actually repeat these observations. This can really advance our understanding of star formation.”
Observations with the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope should be able to resolve lower-mass stars in the cluster, giving a more holistic view of the region. Over Webb’s lifespan, astronomers will be able to repeat this experiment and measure the motion of the low-mass stars. They will then be able to compare the high-mass stars and the low-mass stars to finally learn the full extent of the dynamics of this nursery.
Credits: NASA, ESA, A. James (STScI); CC BY 4.0
Here's the Milky Way in all its glory.
Seen above the limestone seastacks of Gog & Magog - two of the 12 Apostles off the southern coast of Victoria in Australia - the brightest part of this photo is the Carina Nebula all of 9,000 light years away in the constellation of Sagittarius.
The dark patch above it is the Coalsack, another nebula but this time a dark one.
Between Gog & Magog is the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), 160,000 light years away, and to the left of the LMC and a little higher in the sky is the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), all of 200,000 light years away.
Makes you think, doesn't it?
After sitting on this panorama for almost 2 years I've finally decided to share it. The fact is that my trip to NZ was marred with lots of clouds and this was a 15 minute window where finally the clouds split, but only briefly. I guess it left a sour taste and I never really bothered check it out. Delay no more, here it is.
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures a small portion of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The SMC is a dwarf galaxy and one of the Milky Way’s nearest neighbors, lying only about 200,000 light-years from Earth. It makes a pair with the Large Magellanic Cloud, and both objects are best seen from the Southern Hemisphere, but are visible from some northern latitudes as well.
The Small Magellanic Cloud contains hundreds of millions of stars, but this image focuses on just a small fraction of them. These stars comprise the open cluster NGC 376, which has a total mass only about 3,400 times that of the Sun. Open clusters, as the name suggests, are loosely bound and sparsely populated. This distinguishes open clusters from globular clusters, which generally appear as a continuous blur of starlight at their centers because they are so crammed with stars. In the case of NGC 376, individual stars are clearly discernable even in the most densely populated parts of this image.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA, A. Nota, G. De Marchi
#NASA #NASAMarshall #NASAGoddard #ESA #HubbleSpaceTelescope #HST #astrophysics #galaxy #SmallMagellanicCloud #dwarfgalaxy
Nikon d5500
50mm + Hoya Red Intensifier filter
ISO 3200
f/3.5
16 x 30 seconds
iOptron SkyTracker
16 image panorama of the Large & Small Magellanic Clouds over the 'Tree of Soles', a dead tree covered in old shoes, at Herron Point about an hour south of Perth in Western Australia.
Nikon d5500
35mm
ISO 3200
f/2.5
28 x 30 seconds
iOptron SkyTracker
28 shot panorama of the Large & Small Magellanic Clouds above a section of rapids on the Murray River at Dwellingup, about 100km south of Perth in Western Australia.
Nikon d5500
35mm
ISO 3200
f/3.2
Sky: 6 x 25 seconds
Foreground: 5 x 15 seconds
11 shot panorama of the Magellanic Clouds over farmland at Harvey, approximately 125km south of Perth in Western Australia.
NGC 292
A nearby galaxy in the constellation of Tucana
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Camera: Canon 60D
Lens: 50mm
Image exposure: 45sec x 60
Settings: f/2, ISO 800
Cropped image size: 19.4° x 12.9°
Image date: 2024-10-06
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If you didn't know that the Carina Nebula was just rising over the horizon, you could be forgiven for thinking they were red fireworks or red flares, but they are stellar-fireworks, the Carina Nebula otherwise known as The Great Nebula in Carina.
The nebula is one of the largest diffuse nebulae in our skies. It contains several open clusters of stars. Although it is some four times as large and even brighter than the famous Orion Nebula, the Carina Nebula is much less well known, due to its location in the southern sky.
The nebula lies at an estimated distance between 6,500 and 10,000 lights years from Earth.
Regarding the light bow on the left I can not be too sure what it is, there is some town light pollution and there is also some green airglow visible.
14 exposure panorama taken in the early hours of the morning just after the moon set. Temps were a mild -4c.
A close up image of one of the regions in the Small Magellanic Cloud that I planned on imaging after noticing this (and a few other objects) in my wide field image of the SMC which I exposed about a month ago.
This frame contains NGC346, NGC371 and NGC395.
This bi-color image was exposed through a Celestron C8 at f6.3 (1280mm focal length) with a QHY268M camera and the 2 channels were integrated through Baader 7nm H-Alpha and OIII filters.
Total integration time for this image was 4 hours and 10 minutes.
“Quietness is the beginning of virtue. To be silent is to be beautiful. Stars do not make a noise.”
James Stephens, Irish poet, 1880–1950.
It was easy not to make a noise as I stood here at the Cuttagee bridge on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, looking at the stars in April this year. Nature was providing a wonderful soundscape already and did not need any effort on my part. To my left was the repeating thud as waves flopped onto the beach at the edge of the Tasman Sea while soothing bubbling and gurgling calls issued from the hasteless flow of Cuttagee Creek as it passed under the old bridge to join that same watery expanse.
Augmenting the aural beauty was the scene in the sky, with starry points of light, a star cluster or two, and the powder-puff wisps of the Magellanic Clouds wordlessly telling of their wonders to all who would hear.
I created this image by shooting two overlapping photos and stitching them together. Both frames were shot with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.8, using an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 6400.
The Milky Way arching over the Southern Ocean, including the Large Magellanic Cloud , Small Magellanic Cloud and an iridium flare.
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is surrounded by about fifty dwarf galaxies. Most of these galaxies are only identifiable through telescopes and have been named after the constellation in which they appear on the sky (for example, Draco, Sculptor or Leo). However, the two most obvious dwarf galaxies are called the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), and these are easily visible to the unaided eye. Traditionally these dwarf galaxies have been thought of as satellites in orbit around the Milky Way for many billions of years. Now, however, new data from ESA’s Gaia spacecraft have shown that the majority of the dwarf galaxies are passing the Milky Way for the first time. This forces astronomers to reconsider the history of the Milky Way and how it formed, along with the nature and composition of the dwarf galaxies themselves.
Credits: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Not a very good night for astronomy at Paranal, with thin clouds passing. The green light is atmospheric airglow, and the reddish light low down is from the town of Taltal, 70 miles away on the coast.
Nikon D5100
16 x 25 seconds
11mm
ISO 5000
f3.2
16 shot panorama of the 'other end' of the Milky Way or the tail end of the core if you prefer, stretching from Rigil Kent on the right to Auriga on the left. This is the summer view across Southern Hemisphere skies with the Magellanic Clouds also prominent.
NGC292 The Small Magellanic Cloud. NGC104 - globular cluster 47 Tucanae can be seen at the bottom of the image.
Imaged from SSO on 23rd September 2015 - T8
Takahashi FSQ ED Petzval Apochromat Astrograph. Aperture: 106mm, f/5.0
FLI Microline 16803 CCD
Luminance 5x180 seconds
2x300 seconds each R,G,B channel
Another amazing night with bright airglow and a hint of southern borealis or wishful thinking. Anyhow those colours certainly weren't visible to the naked eye. But you quickly realise why they call it the Milky Way when you're out here, it is REALLY bright up there! Panorama consisting of 18 photographs, a steady tripod, wide lens and three woolen jumpers.
Even at night, with only the feeble photons of atmospheric airglow to light the landscape, you can see that the water in this agricultural dam is a very unappealing colour. The still air on the night left the pond's surface undisturbed, offering me a mirrored but muted view of the treeline, the Milky Way and the light coming from the planet Jupiter. Despite the dirtiness of the pool's contents, you can still see some hues of starlight reflected in the water.
The Magellanic Cloud galaxies are conspicuous in the top-left corner of my panorama, keeping station as they travel through the Local Group of galaxies with our marvellous & majestic Milky Way. I've mentioned that Jupiter is one of the lights shining from the dark mirror, and you can see the source of that light in the sky above the dusty stretch of our home galaxy, as well as the planet Saturn up and to the right of Jupiter's bright beacon. It's frustrating that the clouds conspired to keep me from photographing the stars and planets during last weekend's New Moon period. With very few chances left to shoot the Milky Way's core region as the year draws to a close, so I'll be relying on my trove of shots from previous expeditions–like this one–to keep me posting here.
I created this panoramic photo by shooting thirteen overlapping single-frame images, then merging them using stitching software on my Mac. For each of those individual shots, I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera set to an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 6400 and fitted with a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.4.
In September of 2017, fellow nightscape photographer Ian Williams invited me to visit him in Canberra, Australia’s capital city, for a night sky photography session. Following one of Ian’s nightscape workshops, we headed south through the town of Cooma, eventually stopping in one of the area’s characteristic rocky fields.
Despite the near-zero temperature, we spent a few hours making the most of the ultra-dark and mostly cloudless night, shooting as many compositions as we could before our fingers almost froze. Although I’ve previously shared other shots from that night, the image I’m posting today has been languishing in the depths of my hard drive for nearly four years.
As well as the Magellanic Clouds and the Milky Way, I included Ian and his ghostly double in my 38-frame panorama. The galaxies M31 and M33 are also in the picture but are almost washed out by the yellow light-bloom from Cooma, 26 km distant (16 mi).
Here are the settings and equipment I used to shoot each of the 38 frames that make up the panorama. Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.
A few days back I posted a shot of the Large Magellanic Cloud hanging in the sky on its own. Tonight I have one for you of the Large cloud with its companion, the Small Magellanic Cloud, as they dominate the dark sky between above a field of corn near Bodalla, New South Wales, Australia. I’ve been to this location several times over the past three years and not noticed the power lines above the field. It was only after I checked the shot on my camera’s LCD that I noticed the three dark streaks scribed across the lower part of the scene. I detest power lines in my shots as much as I do clouds!
The power lines don’t ruin the shot, I guess, and are coincidentally positioned underneath the Small Magellanic Cloud and top and bottom of the globular star cluster 47 Tucanae. The cluster looks like a large star in this photo but is in fact a ball of approximately one million stars that are orbiting together in a roughly spherical arrangement. Down and to the right of the Small Magellanic Cloud you can see a blue-white star, Achernar. This is actually a binary system, with the second star informally known as “Achernar B”. The pair are located about 140 light-years from Earth. These four objects are very familiar sights to watchers of the southern night skies.
This single-shot image was taken with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm @ f/2.4, with a 15-second exposure @ ISO 6400.
I shot this photo last Thursday night, 27th February. The only clouds visible were the two galaxies you see in the picture, known as the Magellanic Clouds. Astronomers classify these two blobs of light as dwarf galaxies, and they travel through space with our home galaxy, the Milky Way.
The Magellanic Clouds are a familiar sight to Southern Hemisphere folk who’ve spent even a little bit of time studying the night sky. The galaxies are easily mistaken for the meteorological objects after which they’re named. If you look carefully, you can see the smaller cloud–aka the Small Magellanic Cloud–reflected in the water that the tide had washed over the rock shelf at Black Point Head, Gerroa, Australia.
With clouds and rain forecast for at least the next two weeks, I have to keep looking at photos like this to remind me that clear skies can come again.
The photo is a single-frame image, captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 6400.
The Milky Way night sky filled with stars over the rural countryside in Blayney, Central West, NSW, Australia.
It's almost cliché to say that seeing the world through another's eyes can help you to understand a point of view that's different to your own. In my experience, the advice is worthwhile, and I challenge myself to keep on doing that every day. Therefore today's photo is a look at the night through the eyes of another–those of a fish! Well, a fisheye lens at least.
The first fisheye lens was created by placing a photographic glass plate at the bottom of a bucket of water, using a "pinhole" aperture to let the light through. The first such photo was taken in 1905 by American physicist and inventor Robert W Wood. Photographers used the bucket-of-water method until 1922. That's not the kind of lens you could carry in your pocket!
I used a more conventional fisheye lens to shoot this photo of the Milky Way standing almost vertical over the 160-year-old Merrilla Uniting Church west of Goulburn, Australia. The Southern Cross is not too far above the tip of the church's finial piece, and the Magellanic Clouds seem to be hanging in the sky to the left of the building. The white glow shining from behind the church is light-spill from Australia's capital city, Canberra. At the upper left-hand corner, you can see the light from the nearby Goulburn city centre.
I shot this single-frame photo with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 8mm f/3.5 fisheye lens @ f/4.0, using an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 6400.
Corunna Lake is on the far south coast of my home state of New South Wales, Australia. From dawn until dusk during the hotter months of our year–October through until April–the lake’s surface is stirred by the wakes from dozens of watercraft, be they petrol, electric or human-powered boats and the water-skiers towed behind some of them.
Come nightfall though, and especially now during winter, it’s only the occasional splash from fish jumping that ruffles the top of the lake. With no boats, no breeze, no clouds and the moon having set earlier, last Saturday evening (July 6th) at Corunna Lake was a gift to the keen nightscape photographer. My LED lamp illuminated the rocks under the water at the lake’s edge, and the stars and atmospheric airglow lit up the sky. There was a tiny amount of movement in the water which has made the reflected stars look like they’re making a slight circular movement. My photo has captured the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds suspended above the southeastern shoreline. You can see the southern end of the Milky Way’s central band parallel to the right-hand edge of the frame.
There are several other features of this night’s sky that I have highlighted for you on the marked-up version of this image, available by swiping to the left here on Instagram.
I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.8 to capture this scene, using an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 6400.
We'll start at the beginning.
Driving to Coles Bay on a very wet and windy day, it seemed all hope of a clear sky for an early morning shoot had disappeared. But I set the alarm anyway. The conditions didn't even allow me time to scout out a great location. But by 5.00am there was not a cloud in the sky and all was calm. Working quickly is the key. The light begins to change so rapidly.
In this shot we can just make out the first inkling of the dawn. The silhouetted landscape reminded me of a Japanese print I had once seen, so that was confirmation enough of a good spot. So I took the shot on manual focus (it's just too dark for AF) and hoped for the best.
Years ago I was a member of an amateur astronomical society and used to know the Southern Sky like the back of my hand. I was glad that I still recognised the key features. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (dwarf galaxies neighbouring our own Milky Way). The Southern Cross (Crux) is there, although more difficult to make out in the pristine sky unaffected by city lights. And most pleasing of all to me is how clearly the Coalsack Nebula showed up.
The Coalsack Nebula is the most prominent dark nebula in the skies, visible to the naked eye as a dark patch obscuring a brief section of Milky Way stars as they cross their southernmost region of the sky just south of Crux. I even had a couple of shooting stars during the exposure - you'll see one here in this shot.
The choice of black and white was simple in the end. It provided a clarity that the colour version lost as the emerging dawn light tended to overshadow the real stars of the show (pardon the pun).
[I've tagged the key astronomical features for you. I tried to keep the exposure as short as possible so that the stars remained points of light and didn't show the earth's rotation. At the same time I wanted to minimise my ISO to reduce noise. In the end ISO400, f/4 and 15 seconds was my compromise.]
Another close up image of another region in the Small Magellanic Cloud... an ongoing imaging mission that I planned with my wide field image of the SMC from about two months ago.
This frame contains NGC248, NGC249, NGC261 and NGC267.
Not the best quality as the sky was plagued by thin and high altitude cloud haze that blurred the signal and shortened the possible amount of time to expose subs.
This bi-color image was exposed through a Celestron C8 at f6.3 (1280mm focal length) with a QHY268M camera and the 2 channels were integrated through Baader 7nm H-Alpha and OIII filters.
Total integration time for this image was short, interrupted by high altitude clouds and I managed only 3 hours and 30 minutes of exposure time.
The South Celestial Pole (SCP) photographed from the VLT Survey Telescope (VST). 1,042 thirty-sec exposures spanning more than 8.5 hours and showing Earth's rotation. Paranal Observatory, Atacama Desert, Chile, 24-25 Aug 2009 (Nikon D700).
© 2009 José Francisco Salgado, PhD
See the resulting video, meteor shot, Milky Way shot, Magellanic Clouds shot
Explore #4 on 16 Dec 2009
Here's another Aurora Austrails pic looking south over a glassy Storm Bay from Goats Bluff, southern Tasmania.
This frame was among several shot back in April 2017 when I knew a lot less than I thought about astro/aurora images but at least the basic exposure was OK - if not a little too long to capture the vertical elements of the aurora properly.
In addition to those green and yellow beams of the aurora behind Betsy Island, we have the Large and Small Magellanic clouds off to the south in the upper right. The bright light in the mid-ground is the navigation beacon on Black Jack Rock and there's some bioluminescence in the breakers lower right. Peacock, Alnair, Achenar, Canopus and sundry other major stars scattered through the frame. The rising Milky Way is just to the left (east) out of the frame.
Lots of stuff going on.
I often think how cool it would be to have another galaxy like Andromeda in the southern sky but the L&SMCs will do for now ;-)
Shot 22:50hrs, 23/04/2017.
Sony A7Rii, Zeiss Batis 18/2.8
30 sec, f/2.8, ISO 2500
Another close up image of a region in the Small Magellanic Cloud. This frame contains NGC456, NGC460 and NGC465... not the brightest or most impressive part of the SMC, not even imaged during the best atmospheric conditions but still a good object to have in the SMC ECU collection.
This bi-color image was exposed through a Celestron C8 at f6.3 (1280mm focal length in theory but 1219mm FL mathematically) with a QHY268M camera and the 2 channels were integrated through Baader 7nm H-Alpha and OIII filters.
Total integration time for this image was 5 hours and 20 minutes.
47 Tucanae: imaged remotely using iTelescope T31 at the Siding Spring Observatory, Australia. Total imaging time 150 minutes.
Nightscaping lately has been far and few between, but a few weeks ago I decided to return to a location I stumbled across one time when I took a wrong turn and found a derelict farm house just off the freeway ( carlosoruephotography.com/2013/11/20/an-outback-sunset/ ). My initial thoughts were I wonder if it's still there or has it been knocked down or renovated? To my delight I found it just the way I left it almost 4 years ago.
Not game to jump the fence 4 years ago, this time I felt more adventurous and I really wanted to try and capture it from the best possible angle. The skies played their part, crystal clear with the Milky Way just above the chimney and the Magellanic clouds (distant galaxies) floating over the old tin roof. Even the Southern Cross made it into the frame on the top right corner of the photograph.
The inside of the house was completely gutted, no doors, no glass windows and the floors were a few wooden planks held together by rusty nails floating above a false bottom floor a metre or so off the ground.
The four Auxiliary Telescopes at ESO’s Paranal Observatory can be seen gazing up to the night sky in this Picture of the Week. With dark and pristine skies, Paranal is one of the best places on Earth to study the universe from. As seen in this spectacular image, the view is really full to the brim of exciting things to look at.
For instance, take a closer look to the right of the Milky Way band, at the two clouds that look like galactic fireworks. These are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, dwarf galaxies that are trapped by the gravity of the Milky Way. In the Mapuche language in south-central Chile they are known as lafken, labken or künchalabken (“the lagoons”), and also rünanko (“the water wells”). [1]
Peering closer to the horizon we see subtle shades of green and red, but what is it? This is called airglow and is faint light emitted atoms and molecules in the atmosphere. This can happen through various mechanisms, like interaction with solar radiation or chemical reactions between molecules. Green airglow comes from oxygen atoms, whereas the red one is due to both oxygen atoms and hydroxyl molecules. Check this ESO cast to learn more about how airglow is created and why Chile is a particularly good place to see it.
Note: [1] Source: Wenumapu. Astronomía y Cosmología Mapuche, Gabriel Pozo Menares & Margarita Canio Llanquinao
Credit: ESO/Juan Carlos Muñoz Mateos
Floating in the sky above two of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) Auxiliary Telescopes are a pair of ethereal shapes. These are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds — two of the 50 or so satellite galaxies that orbit our more massive Milky Way.
Despite being small compared to the Milky Way, the Magellanic Clouds still contain billions of stars. The Large Magellanic Cloud, in the bottom-right of the image, has a diameter of 14 000 light-years, and the Small Magellanic Cloud in the top-centre is 7000 light-years across. At distances of about 160 000 light-years and 200 000 light-years respectively these satellite galaxies are much closer to the Milky Way than our nearest major galaxy, Andromeda, 2.5 million light-years away, making them some of our closest neighbours.
The faint red emission in the sky is called airglow, and it's light naturally emitted by atoms and molecules high up in the atmosphere, oxygen in this case.
These ghostly galaxies can only be seen in the southern hemisphere, in skies that are unpolluted by light from cities. This is one of the reasons that ESO operates the VLT in the remote Chilean Atacama Desert — so that we can study such beguiling objects as the Magellanic Clouds.
Credit: ESO/ M. Zamani
Nikon D5 + 14-24mm f/2.8G | Atacama Desert, Chile, 10 April 2016
© 2016 José Francisco Salgado, PhD
Do not use without permission. 2016.04.10_107353
This 6-pane mosaic was captured remotely using iTelescope T12 at the Siding Spring Observatory, New South Wales , Australia.
I also used iTelescopes T27, T31 and T33 for high resolution images of NGC 346, NGC 104 and NGC 362, which have been added to this mosaic.
Total imaging time was 161 minutes, through HαLRGB filters.
See fully-annoted version here:
The Milky Way above the limestone stacks of Gog and Magog - two of the 12 Apostles off the southern coast of Victoria in Australia - a couple of weeks ago. The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), 160,000 light years away, is in the top centre of the shot and just below it is the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), all of 200,000 light years away.
Another Milky Way shot from Australia - a trip across the Simpson Desert in June last year. Note how the Milky Way is "upside down" compared to this November 2017 shot of the Gibson Steps.
Our campsite was just north of the QAA Line on the border between Queensland and the Northern Territory. The moon was just setting but there was still enough fading light to show up the foreground. The Small Magellanic Cloud is clearly visible in the centre while the Large Magellanic Cloud is a bit fuzzier as it's just above the horizon.
EXIF: 14mm; f/2.8; 30 secs; ISO3200.
35mm
53 x 10 seconds
ISO 5000
f/1.8
Stitched in MS ICE
This is a 53 image panorama taken at Harvey Dam, approximately 125km (100mi) south of Perth in Western Australia. The Large & Small Magellanic Clouds can be see near the horizon just right of centre. The light pollution is coming from the Worsley Alumina Refinery approximately 15km away.
Another shot on a moonless night from the bottom of the Gibson Steps.
The seastacks Gog and Magog are on the far right, the core of the Milky Way is peering above the horizon on the left and Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are dead centre. The really bright start just right of centre is Canopus. It's only 310 light years away, has a radius 71 times that of the Sun and shines 10,000 times as brightly.
The brightest star Sirius is on the far right and, oh yeah, the photo is a stitch of 9 shots using Microsoft ICE.