About 100 billion stars loom over the telescopes at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.
Video screenshot courtesy of Stéphane Guisard
Video screenshot courtesy of Stéphane Guisard
Here it is, your moment of Zen: the Milky Way rising majestically over the Paranal Observatory in Chile.
This time-lapse video was taken by Stéphane Guisard, whose photos have been seen on this blog many times before (see Related Posts,
below). Guisard used a wide-angle fish-eye lens to capture the whole
sky. Around the bottom are the various telescopes comprising the Very Large Telescope array (each an 8.2-meter behemoth), and you can see the domes moving as they target various astronomical objects.
The Milky Way steals the show here. We live in a vast disk galaxy,
100,000 light-years across. But we’re not in the center; we’re very
roughly halfway from the center to the edge of the disk. That means when
we look toward the constellation of Sagittarius, we are looking toward
the center of the galaxy—like someone who lives halfway to the northern
edge of Manhattan can face south to look “downtown.”
The central bulge
of the galaxy rises right to the zenith, and the flat disk, seen
edge-on, bends due to the weird optical effect of the lens Guisard used.
The disk is littered with gas clouds and spotted with darker clouds of
thick dust that block the light of stars behind them.
Two satellite galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, rise
to the upper left as airplanes streak across the frame. My favorite
part, though, is right at the end, when coming in from the upper right
you can see a faint shaft of light pointing toward the center of the
frame. That’s zodiacal (pronounced Zo-DIE-ah-cull) light,
sunlight reflected by dust shed from comets in the solar system. Like
the Milky Way itself, those particles form a flat disk that we see
edge-on, so it looks like a line across the sky. It’s very faint, and
you need really dark skies to spot it at all.
I’ve never been to Paranal, but someday I hope I will. I can only imagine how incredible the view must be from down there.
posted by Pieface @ 2:13 PM
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