Video by @babaktafreshi | From the roof of Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, let’s fly out to almost five billion light-years away, where a galaxy cluster is revealed by @nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope. The image of Webb’s First Deep Field offers the sharpest infrared view of the universe so far.
Striking facts: The video begins with a wide-angle view of the sky that I photographed in southern Kenya and has a similar angle to our own eyes’ field of view. Webb’s First Deep Field is several thousand times smaller, “approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length,” as NASA described it.
In my second image, shot using a telephoto lens, the square marking the deep field area in the southern constellation Volans is still extremely small and shows just a blank background when zoomed in. The objects here are barely perceptible and so distant that the field remains blank to a professional telescope. Thousands of galaxies—including the faintest objects ever observed in infrared—appears in this 12-hour total exposure by Webb. The galaxy cluster is SMACS 0723. Its light belongs to 4.6 billion years ago, when Earth was just about to form. The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying much more distant galaxies behind it and distorting their image to extended arcs.
Webb’s First Deep Field photo by NASA (@nasa), ESA, CSA, and STScI
Music by composer Barbad Bayat. #astronomy#nasawebb#kilimanjaro#twanight
Photo and video by @babaktafreshi | More than 4,000 years ago, this landscape in Australia had wild visitors from deep space—a dozen fragments of huge meteorites. The largest body left this 180-meter-wide crater (600 ft). Slide 2 is a video from inside one of the craters during early morning, with ambient bird sounds. The site of the Henbury craters in the Northern Territory was indeed one of the darkest places on Earth that I've observed in many years of night photography. The nearest town is Alice Springs, about 140 kilometers (85 mi) away, and the only "light dome" visible was a gentle glow from the south, which soon turned out to be the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring galaxy visible to the unaided eye. The southern Milky Way was most spectacular when the galactic center reached high in the sky. The foreground is lit by a few side flashes during the 30-second exposure. #twanight#meteorite#australia#impactcrater
Photo by @babaktafreshi | It was around midnight, and I was on the bottom of Zion Canyon, in Utah. The setting moon was still shining in this 45-minute exposure. The Earth's rotation created these star trails; the colors represent the stars' surface temperature, with blue being the hottest (young, massive stars) and orange-red the coolest (old red giants). Explore more of the night sky wonders with me @babaktafreshi. #twanight#zion#nationalparks#longexposure
In this time-lapse from Babak Tafreshi, the mirrors of the MAGIC telescope array in La Palma, one of Spain's Canary Islands, collect light created by energetic cosmic gamma rays that can't penetrate our atmosphere. Their brief flashes are called Cherenkov light. The observatory complex is on the top of a massive volcanic caldera, benefiting from exceptionally clear and dark skies. Music by composer Barbad Bayat, from our growing project Celestial Orchestra. Explore more @babaktafreshi. #twanight#astronomy#science#exploration
Photographer Babak Tafreshi captured the Milky Way in this time-lapse video in a natural night sky—in other words, away from city lights. On this March early morning, the bright core of the galaxy in constellations Scorpius and Sagittarius rises above the calm waters of a cove in Cape Cod, one of the remaining dark sky areas in Massachusetts. A ferry from a nearby island appears in the scene, and the incoming tide moves the boats in the foreground. See the complete clip at @babaktafreshi. #twanight#capecod#newengland#stargazing
PERSEIDS OVER KRÁLOVA STUDŇA: After the maximum of #Perseids, I would like to share even some nice #memory. What a wonderful #night of 11-12 August 2016! As the prediction for the annual Perseid #meteorshower promised unusually high activity due to Jupiter’s gravitational influence on the stream of the debris of comet Swift-Tuttle, I was looking for a really good spot to enjoy it. So I decided to spend this time in relatively new Dark Sky Park Králova Studňa in the #VeľkáFatra National Park of Slovakia. The image contains 104 #meteors and 94 of them were captured during the only night 11/12 August between 21pm and 2am UTC (the rest a night before)! The brightest #fireball was about -8 magnitude bright and for a fragment of a second completely illuminated the night countryside! Data from this year are, however, also very promising. Stay tuned for more Perseids images.
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PERSEIDY NAD KRÁLOVOU STUDŇOU: Po maximu roje Perseidy bych se rád podělil i o jednu krásnou vzpomínku. Jaká fantastická noc 11./12. srpna 2016! Neboť byla předpozena vysoká aktivita Perseid způsobená gravitačním vlivem Jupiteru na proud částic komety Swift-Tuttle - mateřských tělísek roje Perseid - hledal jsem nějaké opravdu vhodné místo. A našel jsem jej v poměrně mladém Parku tmavej oblohy Veľká Fatra u hotelu Králova Studňa, který je pro své zařízení parádním stanovištěm k výletům za zážitky pod místním tmavým nebem. A Perseidy stály fakt za to! Ze 104 meteorů bylo 94 z nich na snímku zachyceno za pouhou jedinou noc, v průběhu 5 hodin. Nejjasnější meteor měl odhadem -8 magnitudu a na zlomek sekundy ozářil krajinu. Data z letošních Perseid jsou ovšem rovněž velmi dobrá, snad brzy stihnu dodělat první obrázek. Chtěli byste snímek jako fotoobraz?
#stargazing#universe#perseid#perseidmeteorshower#perseids2016#perseids2021#fireball#shootingstar#slovakia#twanight#canonphotography#idadarksky#astrophotography#saveournightsky#wildlife_aroundworld#yourshotphotographer#science#astronomy#natgeoyourshot#nightscape#universetoday#fotoobraz
Location: Veľká Fatra - Horský Hotel Kráľová Studňa
presents a photo by
@petrhoralek
N I G H T S C A P E R • Photo Award to
Petr Horálek
"Immersive Perseid Nights"
QUOTING Petr: Perseids Are Coming! Will you have a chance to gaze at the #perseids of this year? Annual #meteorshower is not disturbed by the Moon, so you can enjoy many #meteors up above (but far away from cities of lights!). This image is from last year. After many restrictions made the traveling for Perseids a bit complicated, I decided to stay at Seč lake, Czech "Iron Mountains", where the sky is not quite dark due to #lightpollution but still clear enough for watching the show. All nights around maximum were weather permitting and so I fulfilled one of my dreams - to capture the Perseids over rocks of #Oheb ruins, which is a local nature reserve. Under the #milkyway, the night of Perseids was truly immersive. Where will you gaze this year? • Please show support to our guest artists by visiting their IG gallery.
TECHNIQUE & EXIF: Pano / Composite • Canon 6D BCF Modified + Samyang 24mm • f2.2, ISO 8000, pano of 43 segments with 15s exposure from tripod + 109 meteors captured with Samyang 12 mm, f2.8, 30s timelapsing (registered to foreground panorama)
LINKS: www.petrhoralek.com
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@MilkyWay_NightScapes#nightscape#nightphotography#stargazing#universe#perseid#perseidmeteorshower#perseids2020#perseids2021#fireball#shootingstar#twanight#canonphotography#idadarksky#astrophotography#saveournightsky#yourshotphotographer#science#astronomy#natgeoyourshot#universetoday#fantasticuniverse#longexposure_shots#milkywaygalaxy