Saturn Visits the Edge of the Milky Way


Another photo from last weekend’s star party:

Saturn_MW

You might recognize the area in the lower right corner from earlier photos I’ve posted.  The large yellow/red blob is the star Antares (bloated by its extreme brightness), to its right is the globular cluster M4, and above that, surrounded by blue dust, is the Rho Ophiuchi complex.  But this very wide field image (more than 25 degrees across) shows how this area resides at the edge of the Milky Way.  The dense stars and dust of the Milky Way appear as glowing red and black on the left edge, gradually fading to less dense star fields to the right.  Streamers of dark nebulosity seem to connect the Rho Ophiuchi complex to the Milky Way.  And if you look carefully, you might see the “Dark Horse” nebula prancing above the stars.

If you really know the sky well you might also notice something that doesn’t belong here:  The bright spot above and to the left of Rho Ophiuchi is Saturn, which is passing through the area in its long voyage around the Sun.

This photo was captured with a Canon 6D DSLR and 85mm camera lens.  It is a “stack” of 16 exposures of just 30 seconds each, for a total of 8 minutes exposure!  It took a lot of work to process it (mostly because I haven’t done much DSLR imaging for years now), but being able to capture something like this in just a few minutes is amazing, and a real advantage when you live in an area where clear skies are rare.  Granted, this lens was set at f/2.8, so considerably longer exposures would be needed with most telescopes, but still much less than I typically do with the CCD camera.  Not that I’m going to give up the CCD camera – it can do some things far better than the DSLR.  But the Canon 6D is definitely a great tool for astro-photography.

 


About Greg Marshall

I am a retired electronics engineer and after a few months of enjoying my leisure I began to miss doing product development. My astronomy hobby always needed new solutions to unique problems, so I decided that whenever I came up with a good solution I would try to make it available to others.

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