Here is my latest project, the "Pillars of Creation," photographed from a low light pollution area in remote Idaho.
The Pillars of Creation gets its name because the pillars in the photo are home to star creation. This was one of the first celestial objects photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope, and NASA said that the "Hubble image [of the Pillars of Creation] is so popular that it has appeared in movies and television shows, on T-shirts and pillows, and even on a postage stamp."
It's hard to comprehend the scale off these pillars. The two main pillars are around 4 light years tall, which comes out to over 23 trillion miles long. For context, the Moon is about 250,000 miles from Earth. This means that the Pillars are 92 million times the length of the Earth to the Moon.
The Pillars are located about 7,000 light years away. In other words, the light we are looking at in this photo, is what the Pillars looked like thousands of years in the past.
This photo has 3x "narrowband" wavelengths of light (ionized Hydrogen, Sulphur, and Oxygen).
As a side note, while photographing last night, I saw the Milky Way (for the first time?) with my naked eyes. The Northern Lights got a lot of attention recently... but this was equally amazing! The night sky filled with millions of stars is such a majestic and awe inspiring sight. (It's also free, if you can venture out of the City on a clear night.) I suggest searching "Light Pollution Map" to see how far you'd need to travel to get to a truly dark region.
Full size resolution available here (click "Full Resolution" at the top right): https://astrob.in/full/45sgge/0/
Website: https://idahoastro.com/
The Pillars of Creation gets its name because the pillars in the photo are home to star creation. This was one of the first celestial objects photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope, and NASA said that the "Hubble image [of the Pillars of Creation] is so popular that it has appeared in movies and television shows, on T-shirts and pillows, and even on a postage stamp."
It's hard to comprehend the scale off these pillars. The two main pillars are around 4 light years tall, which comes out to over 23 trillion miles long. For context, the Moon is about 250,000 miles from Earth. This means that the Pillars are 92 million times the length of the Earth to the Moon.
The Pillars are located about 7,000 light years away. In other words, the light we are looking at in this photo, is what the Pillars looked like thousands of years in the past.
This photo has 3x "narrowband" wavelengths of light (ionized Hydrogen, Sulphur, and Oxygen).
As a side note, while photographing last night, I saw the Milky Way (for the first time?) with my naked eyes. The Northern Lights got a lot of attention recently... but this was equally amazing! The night sky filled with millions of stars is such a majestic and awe inspiring sight. (It's also free, if you can venture out of the City on a clear night.) I suggest searching "Light Pollution Map" to see how far you'd need to travel to get to a truly dark region.
Full size resolution available here (click "Full Resolution" at the top right): https://astrob.in/full/45sgge/0/
Website: https://idahoastro.com/
