One from the archive tonight. I did have visions of a Sahara dust sunset but unfortunately that was defiantly not a thing this evening because of the cloud. I think we’ve got a couple of days of the dust before it’s gone so fingers crossed for some favourable conditions .
But that did get me thinking about what you can see in the sky when the conditions are right though and to be honest, there’s shed loads. I mentioned a couple of blogs ago about Betelgeuse, 650 odd light years away, part of the Orion constellation.
We’re also now, in the northern hemisphere, into into Milky Way season, the galactic core peaks above the horizon for a couple of minutes at stupid o’clock at the moment but as we move into the summer that becomes earlier and longer and well worth finding somewhere dark just to experience it. The south coast in Dorset is perfect, no land for miles so no light pollution and a beautiful coast to explore!
But, for me, the most mind blowing object in the night sky I’ve ever photographed has to be the Andromeda Galaxy. Best seen during the long dark winter nights looking North, just to the left of the Milky Way’s back yard and about the size of the full moon if seen on a dark night. Once you do a bit of number crunching it tends to make your head hurt… Well, it does mine.
It’s 2.5 million light years away that’s 1.47 x1019 Miles that is it’s a f*ck ton of miles away but you can still see it. To add a bit of context, in this image, Andromeda is the large, slightly blurry “star” in the middle left of the image. 99.stupid amount of 9s% of all the other stars in the image belong to our galaxy and are a fraction of the distance from us compared to Andromeda but for us to travel to even our nearest star, Proxima Centauri at the speed of light would take 4.22 years and for the fastest man made object to date, the Parker Solar Probe, top speed of 13,411 km/sec it would still take 100 years… That’s just mental!
Basically, all I’m saying is step outside when you can and look up! It’s phenomenal!
Image made in Borth on the West Wales coast in early January 2020.
6 second exposure 1320 km through the universe and didn’t move an inch….Relative to the bench…
Focal Thingy 