Pure skies at the La Silla observatory
Many people are still asking themselves or others, if the view to the sky full of stars, with
Milky Way and such dark starry foreground is real. Many people don’t even believe that the Milky Way is something easy to see. It’s too sad that by living in
light polluted cities we completely broke the bound with the starry sky. And images like these are for that many people just some sci-fi or result of a “photoshoping”. Of course, some postprocesing is needed, but the pure beauty of the Universe has to come on the camera’s sensor first! One of the places, where you can literally feel the reality of amazing starry sky is ESO’s
La Silla observatory, deep and high in the
Atacama desert. This image, captured on 22nd January 2015, shows the unbelievable purity of the
non-polluted air, which allows to capture whole arc of the faintest part of the Milky Way, light of even fainter pink
emission nebulae (not visible by eyes), waves of green and orange
glowing air, column of
zodiacal light, the
Gegenschein just above the bright planet Jupiter down from the center of the image, two
Magellanic clouds, and the observant of you will find even “Christmas 2014”
comet Lovejoy. Standing in the middle of road to the
NTT telescope was almost like being a bit under the top of the world… Used Canon 6D Baader IR Modified, Samyang 24 mm, f2.8, ISO 10000, panorama of 52 singular 15s exposures.
