Winston
Lorenzo von Matterhorn
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2009
- Messages
- 9,560
- Reaction score
- 1,749
1,060-hour image of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) captured by Amateur Astronomers
https://astrospace-page.blogspot.co...mage-of-the-large-magellanic-cloud-chile.html
In astrophotography, the amount of time you spend imaging a celestial object is inherently fundamental. The longer your camera's shutter is open, the more light you get, so that the darkest regions of the sky start to get clearer. Usually, amateur astronomers are familiar with very long integration times, such as few minutes or even few tens of hours. However, reaching a total amount of several hundred hours increases the complexity of image processing and therefore remains quite rare... though, five keen amateur astrophotographers challenged themselves and decided to capture a picture of 1060 hours of total exposure time, which can be considered as a world record (professional astronomy excluded).
This image is not only a technical accomplishment, but brings also a scientific interest to one of the most amazing deep sky object of the Southern sky : The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).
The image is a mosaic made of 16 smaller fields of view, which, once stitched together form a high-resolution image of 204 Million of pixels! As of matter of fact, this is not the work of a single person but by a team of five french amateur astronomers called "Ciel Austral": Jean Claude CANONNE, Philippe BERNHARD, Didier CHAPLAIN, Nicolas OUTTERS et Laurent BOURGON.
https://astrospace-page.blogspot.co...mage-of-the-large-magellanic-cloud-chile.html
Links to full versions (14,400 x 14,200 - 82.8 MB) of the image are found on this page:
https://www.cielaustral.com/galerie...XH3moy7-lR7stH2Gb-ZOYPpvpTKMZooK7LpMBa97PQx2Y
14,400 x 14,200 version I resized and cropped to 1920 x 1080 wallpaper:
https://astrospace-page.blogspot.co...mage-of-the-large-magellanic-cloud-chile.html
In astrophotography, the amount of time you spend imaging a celestial object is inherently fundamental. The longer your camera's shutter is open, the more light you get, so that the darkest regions of the sky start to get clearer. Usually, amateur astronomers are familiar with very long integration times, such as few minutes or even few tens of hours. However, reaching a total amount of several hundred hours increases the complexity of image processing and therefore remains quite rare... though, five keen amateur astrophotographers challenged themselves and decided to capture a picture of 1060 hours of total exposure time, which can be considered as a world record (professional astronomy excluded).
This image is not only a technical accomplishment, but brings also a scientific interest to one of the most amazing deep sky object of the Southern sky : The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).
The image is a mosaic made of 16 smaller fields of view, which, once stitched together form a high-resolution image of 204 Million of pixels! As of matter of fact, this is not the work of a single person but by a team of five french amateur astronomers called "Ciel Austral": Jean Claude CANONNE, Philippe BERNHARD, Didier CHAPLAIN, Nicolas OUTTERS et Laurent BOURGON.
https://astrospace-page.blogspot.co...mage-of-the-large-magellanic-cloud-chile.html
Links to full versions (14,400 x 14,200 - 82.8 MB) of the image are found on this page:
https://www.cielaustral.com/galerie...XH3moy7-lR7stH2Gb-ZOYPpvpTKMZooK7LpMBa97PQx2Y
14,400 x 14,200 version I resized and cropped to 1920 x 1080 wallpaper:
