by Anthony Barreiro » Wed Dec 12, 2012 10:56 pm
Guest wrote:Anthony Barreiro wrote:This is a lovely picture, thanks very much. But try as I might, I can't get my bearings in the sky, probably because I've never been to the southern hemisphere. Which direction are we looking? What date and time is it? I see the Magellanic clouds, but I can't figure out how they're oriented toward the Milky Way. Would somebody please help me out?
This is a 230 degree wide view, which is why it is so disorientating. Projecting such a large chunk of sky onto a flat image also distorts it somewhat. It roughly faces West, and was taken around 04h30 (local time) on 2 June 2012. One can more or less reproduce it (minus the trees) on Stellarium or similar software.
Enjoy!
Florian
Thanks Florian! Yes, the 230 degree view threw me off, also the fact that everything is upside down relative to how I'm used to seeing it in the northern hemisphere. But now I can see Alpha and Beta Centauri to the right of the leftmost foreground tree, Antares between the center and rightmost foreground trees, M7, M8, M20, and the large Sagittarius star cloud above the rightmost foreground tree, Vega just above and slightly to the left of the third backgound tree from the right, Altair above Vega, and Cygnus in the lower left corner of the photo.
The full resolution photo is really beautiful, by the way. I just wish I had a huge monitor to display the entire picture at high resolution.
[quote="Guest"][quote="Anthony Barreiro"]This is a lovely picture, thanks very much. But try as I might, I can't get my bearings in the sky, probably because I've never been to the southern hemisphere. Which direction are we looking? What date and time is it? I see the Magellanic clouds, but I can't figure out how they're oriented toward the Milky Way. Would somebody please help me out?[/quote]
This is a 230 degree wide view, which is why it is so disorientating. Projecting such a large chunk of sky onto a flat image also distorts it somewhat. It roughly faces West, and was taken around 04h30 (local time) on 2 June 2012. One can more or less reproduce it (minus the trees) on Stellarium or similar software.
Enjoy!
Florian[/quote]
Thanks Florian! Yes, the 230 degree view threw me off, also the fact that everything is upside down relative to how I'm used to seeing it in the northern hemisphere. But now I can see Alpha and Beta Centauri to the right of the leftmost foreground tree, Antares between the center and rightmost foreground trees, M7, M8, M20, and the large Sagittarius star cloud above the rightmost foreground tree, Vega just above and slightly to the left of the third backgound tree from the right, Altair above Vega, and Cygnus in the lower left corner of the photo.
The full resolution photo is really beautiful, by the way. I just wish I had a huge monitor to display the entire picture at high resolution.