Wide-angle view of the Milky Way
I recently had the chance to take some wide-angle images of the Milky Way core from a site with a small amount of light pollution, and no moon. (Yay for the new moon falling close to a weekend, as well!)
Sadly, there was a lot of fast-moving, high-level cloud that played havoc with most of the sub-frames I took. I was pretty certain that I’d end up throwing most of them out, so ended up taking 50 of each target, just to be safe. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see that my stacking software ignored the clouds and gave me some very good images to work with.
There was another photographer down there as well, and he told us that there was an Aurora Australis alert on, so with luck we might be able to see something. I wasn’t able to see much, just a faint glow on the southern horizon, but The Ice Queen had her binoculars with her and was having a good look for the aurora - she saw a pink flare of light as the aurora moved and danced in the sky. Now we’re both wanting to travel somewhere that gives a better view of the Aurora.
The bright line of lights at the very bottom of the image are from the town of San Remo, a short distance away. These lights are reflected off the bottom of a layer of low cloud, whilst a layer of mid-level cloud (all blurred because it was moving as I took the image) separating San Remo from the bright stars of the Milky Way.
The lights of San Remo under the stars
This image was stacked using ‘Sequator’ and then processed to show how many stars are out there and aren’t easily visible to the naked eye. You can see all the detail in the Milky Way, and the vast clouds of dust that hide the central galactic core from us.
Antares is the large yellow-orange star just above the centre of the image. If you look carefully you can see the other stars around it that illuminate the vast gas and dust clouds of the Rho Ophicius region. The long dust ’lanes’ from Antares to the galactic bulge are also clearly visible.
Milky Way core and Antares (1)
I used a different software package to stack the same source images as Image 2, and the end result is much different.. ‘Siril’ has a much steeper learning curve, and I still need to work at getting the best out of it. However, this image I processed slightly differently so that the stars are muted compared to Image 2 and the subtle detail of the dust clouds comes to the front.
Milky Way core and Antares (2)
To Australian Aboriginals, the dark dust clouds of the Milky Way make up the body of ‘The Emu’ (with the Coalsack Nebula as it’s head and beak). They used the position of The Emu in the sky as a way of telling the seasons, and if you’re interested there are several recently released books on the topic of the Aboriginals and their astronomical stories.
This image was taken reasonably early in the night, and the Emu is only at a 45 degree angle. The two bright stars between the body and head of the Emu are Alpha Centauri (left) and Hadar (right). Alpha Centauri is our closest stellar neighbour and is about 4.5 lightyears away. To the right of the Emu’s head are the 5 stars that make up ‘Crux’, the Australian Cross.
The Emu
I took this image later in the evening, just as my fingers were starting to feel the effects of the cold. (Yes, it’s mid-winter here, and when the skies are clear the temperatures can drop quite low.) I didn’t stay much longer after this - enough to capture some long-exposure shots and the calibration images required for correct image processing.
Remember I mentioned the Southern Aurora? That what’s making the orange glow across the bottom of the image. The horizon is all blurred and odd because the camera was on the Star tracker - so the stars are round and crisp, whilst the foreground is all blurred and smeared.
The blue/grey blob at lower left is the Large Magellanic Cloud. Again, you can clearly see Crux, Alpha Centauri and the dark dust clouds that make up the image of The Emu.
A Vertical Emu
