I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks

Tuesday, May 14, 2019

Astronomy Tuesday



I've posted images from the Large Magellanic Cloud before -- and I've seen it, with its smaller companion galaxy, in the skies over Alice Springs, Australia -- but it didn't resemble this.

This image is a mosaic of 3900 frames with a total of 1,060 hours of exposure time in both broadband and narrowband filters, so you can see the clouds of ionized gas that surround the stars in a way that our eyes cannot. Cameras are often much less satisfactory than the human eye, because they don't have a human brain processing the light and deciding what we see. That's why it's impossible to get a good picture of a shadowed foreground without having the background sky fade to white unless you use a computer to stack multiple exposures; our brains can do the necessary adjustments automatically. But cameras do a much better job at seeing stars. They can see wavelengths our eyes cannot, and they can stare for hours if necessary to capture every photon of light.

Image Credit and Copyright: Team Ciel Austral - J. C. Canonne, N. Outters, P. Bernhard, D. Chaplain, L. Bourgon

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