The Milky Way Over The Badlands (2009 Aug 18)

[orin stepanek]

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090818.html
The light flashes used to light up the buttes make the picture look almost unreal. They almost look like cardboard cutouts. Reminds me of a stage set. It's kind of cool how lighting can make this look so unusual. 8)

Orin

[apodman]

Jupiter, on the left of the photo, is near opposition and shining at the whopping magnitude of -2.9 while Antares, the yellow-looking star (a red supergiant, the heart of the Scorpion) on the right of the photo and the 16th brightest star in the night sky, shines at a mere magnitude +1.1 - so Jupiter is currently 4 full magnitudes brighter than (40 times as bright as) Antares. Two nights ago in my location, Antares was just barely visible through the light pollution and hazy air while Jupiter shone through as if the sky were dark and crystal clear. (Full disclosure: Antares is variable, and I don't know its actual current magnitude, so I used a typical figure from a table of bright stars.)

My favorites (the teapot, the Lagoon, and the Trifid) are so prominent in this photo that y'all can just find them for yourselves this time.

the buttes ... look like cardboard cutouts

It's all part of a conspiracy to make the lunar and Martian "photos" look real by comparison.

[SR82]

I've been looking up at the night sky for many years now. But I have never been able to make out the Milky Way! I know where it is supposed to be, but can't see the diffuse glow of the main part of our own galaxy side-on relative to the rest of the night sky. I certainly never see anything like the "Milky Way Over Badlands" picture, beautiful though it may be. As far as my eyes go (and they are better than 20:20 with glasses) that picture may as well be of a different galaxy altogether, from a different planet! Does anyone else share this experience? (or lack of experience of what apparently should be a stunning sight?)

[neufer]

the buttes ... look like cardboard cutouts

It's all part of a conspiracy to make the lunar and Martian "photos" look real by comparison.

Butt the badlands photo has more convincing looking grass.

[Vivian]

Forgive me to ask such a silly question.
Why did the Jupiter look so bright in the picture?

[walkingoutside]

Hi! We're a homeschool family and we've been wondering for months now--when something is photographed--such as Jupiter in this photo--why does it always have six rays coming out of it? Why not five, or seven? We haven't been able to find the answer to this online.

And yes, this beautiful picture does look like it belongs on an old view master reel! (-: The plant life looks like little grassy stuff--it looks like there's hardly any distance between the camera and the mountains.

Deb

[apodman]

I've been looking up at the night sky for many years now. But I have never been able to make out the Milky Way! I know where it is supposed to be, but can't see the diffuse glow of the main part of our own galaxy side-on relative to the rest of the night sky. I certainly never see anything like the "Milky Way Over Badlands" picture, beautiful though it may be. As far as my eyes go (and they are better than 20:20 with glasses) that picture may as well be of a different galaxy altogether, from a different planet! Does anyone else share this experience? (or lack of experience of what apparently should be a stunning sight?)

Nobody ever sees with their eyes what a time exposure photograph shows. But you are not alone in trying in vain to see the Milky Way. I grew up in NJ about 10 miles outside of NYC, studied the charts and knew exactly where to look, and was never rewarded for my efforts. Even in my usual travels 150 miles north or south of the city, I still could not see the Milky Way. I concluded that the Milky Way was elusive and hard to see. Then when I was 24 years old I was on a beach in Georgia in the middle of the night, and I looked up in the sky, and there it was - right where it was supposed to be and extremely prominent. So, my friend, my conclusion changed. It's all about dark skies. Now I know places away from light pollution a few dozen miles from where I live in MD where I can see it, but in the skies of the suburbs where I live it's still impossible.

[apodman]

Forgive me to ask such a silly question.
Why did the Jupiter look so bright in the picture?

Because Jupiter is bright. At magnitude -2.9 it is far brighter than the brightest star. (As mentioned in a post above, it is currently 40 times as bright as the brightest star in this picture.) Only Venus (which attains magnitude -4), the moon, and the sun are brighter. Also, this is a time exposure photograph that lets enough light into the camera to record all the dim objects that make up the Milky Way; when you let that much light in for that long, the light from a bright object such as Antares or Jupiter saturates all the pixels (or the area of the film if you are using film) that it would cover in a short exposure. All the glow around the bright object (neighboring pixels or adjacent areas of film) also has time to saturate.

we've been wondering for months now--when something is photographed--such as Jupiter in this photo--why does it always have six rays coming out of it?

When light going through an optical device encounters an obstruction, such as the iris of a camera shutter, it causes diffraction spikes. The iris of this camera lens may be made of six pieces. You can buy "star filters" for your camera to have different numbers of spikes. You can also use effect in a graphics program (like Photoshop) to put in the spike effect later, but that is not the case here.

[neufer]

Hi! We're a homeschool family and we've been wondering for months now--when something is photographed--such as Jupiter in this photo--why does it always have six rays coming out of it? Why not five, or seven? We haven't been able to find the answer to this online.

<<The aperture is an opening in the lens, made by a group of thin metal blades, which controls the amount of light that enters your camera to form an image. The aperture has two main effects on exposure – it alters the amount of your image that appears in focus, and it also affects how long you will need to open the shutter for the correct exposure.

The curvature of the aperture and the number of blades it’s made of has a direct effect on how smooth out-of-focus backgrounds appear. The more blades used the rounder the aperture, leading to smoother background blur, known as bokeh.

Another phenomenon affected by the aperture are diffraction stars. These occur when a strong point source of light is partially obscured in the image. The result is a bright, multi-pointed star radiating from the light source. The number of points on the star is influenced directly by the number of aperture blades. Lenses with an even number of blades create stars with an equal number of points, so a lens with a six-blade diaphragm creates a six pointed star. Apertures made from an odd number of blades create stars with double the number of points. A nine bladed diaphragm creates a beautiful 18 point star.>>

[Andy Wade]

You can create this effect using a starlight filter but in this case I think it is caused by the camera's optics.

Crikey! Beaten to it!
Twice!

[apodman]

Crikey! Beaten to it! Twice!

At least it shows we're not making this stuff up (unless there's a heck of a conspiracy).

[geckzilla]

I'm the opposite. I went from living in a place where it was easy to spot the Milky Way to living in a place where I might see Jupiter and Venus if I'm lucky. "Milky" is a very appropriate term for it, by the way. It looks nothing like the Badlands photo to the naked eye other than the shape. You need to get away from civilization! Not on the ocean, though. It could be overcast every single night if you try there.

[Nancy D]

I grew up in a small town in the Texas panhandle. I used to sit on my front porch and look at the Milky Way. Boy do I miss that!

I thought the horse didn't exist in North America until the Spanish brought them over. Why would there be fossils of ancestors of the horse in the badlands?

[tlc]

This looks fake. The power of any light it would take to actually illuminate the Badlands Wall and cast sharp shadows like that is beyond anything I know of. The foreground is weeds/grass etc and casts shadows on the cutouts behind. The Milky Way looks like it was taken from an earlier APOD shot that was wonderful.

[bystander]

This looks fake. ... The Milky Way looks like it was taken from an earlier APOD shot that was wonderful.

Commercial, but not fake. Most of Mr. Pacholka's pictures include the Milky Way.
See TWAN Galleries: Wally Pacholka or Astropics.

[Chris Peterson]

This looks fake. The power of any light it would take to actually illuminate the Badlands Wall and cast sharp shadows like that is beyond anything I know of. The foreground is weeds/grass etc and casts shadows on the cutouts behind.

An ordinary flashlight is probably enough; a hand held searchlight certainly so. Compared with the brightness of the Milky Way, these are very bright. Make a long enough exposure to capture the sky and it will be long enough to show the artificially illuminated hills. You actually need a very dark location to avoid having the foreground lit by scattered light pollution, which would have made this peculiar lighting effect impossible.

[bystander]

You actually need a very dark location to avoid having the foreground lit by scattered light pollution, which would have made this peculiar lighting effect impossible.

The Badlands at night is very dark, the Milky Way is easy to see. The Park Rangers have an astronomy lecture and show for campers on clear nights.

[Joe Stieber]

The Badlands Wall does indeed look like a cardboard cutout. All we need is a model railroad in the foreground.

On a more factual note, the text says the picture was taken "looking southwest." Since Jupiter and Capricornus are not long after rising, they are roughly in the southeast; therefore, the center of the picture is actually closer to south-southeast.

As far as seeing the Milky Way goes, I live in the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia and have never seen it from my home. However, if I travel about 35 miles (less than an hour) to the southern NJ Pinelands, the summer Milky Way billows on a clear night. That was the case this past weekend when the marvelous band of starlight from Cassiopeia through the Summer Triangle down to Sagittarius was prominent. I was even able to spot Uranus naked eye before the moon rose - all from New Jersey!

[apodman]

if I travel ... to the southern NJ Pinelands, the summer Milky Way billows on a clear night

My problem was sticking too close to the well lit beach resorts (there's nothing like an amusement pier for light pollution, caramel corn vapor lofted by sea spray for haze, and a salty crust on my spectacles for total blindness). That and the fear that if I went into the Pine Barrens the Jersey Devil would get me.

[bystander]

I thought the horse didn't exist in North America until the Spanish brought them over. Why would there be fossils of ancestors of the horse in the badlands?

Primitive horses show up in the Americas several times, including close relatives of the modern domestic horse. However, all species became extinct in the Americas 11,000 years ago until their reintroduction in the 15th and 16th centuries CE.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_ ... ern_horses

[neufer]

I thought the horse didn't exist in North America until the Spanish brought them over. Why would there be fossils of ancestors of the horse in the badlands?

Primitive horses show up in the Americas several times, including close relatives of the modern domestic horse. However, all species became extinct in the Americas 11,000 years ago until their reintroduction in the 15th and 16th centuries CE.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_ ... ern_horses

<<Horses were absent from the Americas until the Spanish Conquistadors brought domestic horses from Europe, beginning in 1493, and escaped horses quickly established large wild herds. The early naturalist Buffon suggested in the 1760s that this was an indication of inferiority of fauna in the New World, then later reconsidered this idea. William Clark's 1807 expedition to Big Bone Lick found "leg and foot bones of the Horses" which were included with other fossils sent to Thomas Jefferson and evaluated by the anatomist Caspar Wistar, but neither commented on the significance of this find.

During the Beagle survey expedition the young naturalist Charles Darwin had remarkable success with fossil hunting in Patagonia. On 10 October 1833 at Santa Fe, Argentina, he was "filled with astonishment" when he found a horse's tooth in the same stratum as fossil giant armadillos, and wondered if it might have been washed down from a later layer, but concluded that this was "not very probable". After the expedition returned in 1836 the anatomist Richard Owen confirmed that the tooth was from an extinct species which he subsequently named Equus curvidens, and remarked that "This evidence of the former existence of a genus, which, as regards South America, had become extinct, and has a second time been introduced into that Continent, is not one of the least interesting fruits of Mr. Darwin's palæontological discoveries."

In 1848 a study On the fossil horses of America by Joseph Leidy systematically examined Pleistocene horse fossils from various collections including that of the Academy of Natural Sciences and concluded that at least two ancient horse species had existed in North America: Equus curvidens and another which he named Equus americanus. A decade later, however, he found that the latter name had already been taken and renamed it Equus complicatus.

The original sequence of species believed to have evolved into the horse was based on fossils discovered in North America in the 1870s by paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. The sequence, from Hyracotherium (popularly called Eohippus) to the modern horse (Equus), was popularized by Thomas Huxley and became one of the most widely-known examples of a clear evolutionary progression. The horse's evolutionary lineage became a common feature of biology textbooks, and the sequence of transitional fossils was assembled by the American Museum of Natural History into an exhibit which emphasized the gradual, "straight-line" evolution of the horse.

Since then, as the number of equid fossils has increased, the actual evolutionary progression from Hyracotherium to Equus has been discovered to be much more complex and multi-branched than was initially supposed. The straight, direct progression from the former to the latter has been replaced by a more elaborate model with numerous branches in different directions, of which the modern horse is only one of many. It was first recognized by George Gaylord Simpson in 1951 that the modern horse was not the "goal" of the entire lineage of equids, it is simply the only genus of the many horse lineages that has happened to survive.>>

[neufer]

This looks fake. The power of any light it would take to actually illuminate the Badlands Wall and cast sharp shadows like that is beyond anything I know of. The foreground is weeds/grass etc and casts shadows on the cutouts behind.

An ordinary flashlight is probably enough; a hand held searchlight certainly so. Compared with the brightness of the Milky Way, these are very bright. Make a long enough exposure to capture the sky and it will be long enough to show the artificially illuminated hills. You actually need a very dark location to avoid having the foreground lit by scattered light pollution, which would have made this peculiar lighting effect impossible.

The flashlight source somewhat in front of camera is no doubt the cause of the fake overall appearance. There are virtually no shadows to give any definition to the flattened Wall (while flashlight shadows do give definition to the nearby grass). The flashlight should have been used well off to the side.

[Chris Peterson]

The flashlight source somewhat in front of camera is no doubt the cause of the fake overall appearance. There are virtually no shadows to give any definition to the flattened Wall (while flashlight shadows do give definition to the nearby grass). The flashlight should have been used well off to the side.

Well, I don't know what you mean by "should". If the flashlight were located differently, the effect would be different. But none of Wally's pictures come close to showing anything that I'd describe as "real"; they are his aesthetic interpretations. So what you would do and what he would do are likely different.

[orin stepanek]

Well, I don't know what you mean by "should". If the flashlight were located differently, the effect would be different. But none of Wally's pictures come close to showing anything that I'd describe as "real"; they are his aesthetic interpretations. So what you would do and what he would do are likely different.

I like his work! I find it quite artistic. He has his own style. To me he is a photographer artist.

Orin

[geckzilla]

Some of the fake appearance might also be caused by the blurry parts where stitching was involved. Just a guess. I don't think this particular image is a very effective example of his technique. Aesthetically speaking, anyway. One thing I really disagree with is the sampling up which has been done to the photo for display on the APOD page. If you click the image you get the original size which is a lot more crisp but much smaller. Wally sells his images and has a good reason not to supply high resolution downloads or people could simply have them printed locally. It's unfortunate that we can't see it at that size without the resampling but it is also unfortunate that the image's quality was degraded for the sake of displaying it as the APOD.