Dark Sky Astrophoto

Remember the picture,from December, of the constellation Orion rising over the TWR offices?  Here it is again.  ha-ha

Well, a couple weeks later I went out to the east coast of Bonaire, not far from the land sailing track, and shot another image of almost exactly the same section of sky.  The super dark skies allowed me to do a much longer exposure.  You can see the Milky Way, as well as a bunch of fainter stars and Nebulae.

I've labeled some of the points of interest in the picture below.  If you click on one of these small images, you can cycle through larger versions of all three of the pictures to better see the details and to be able to read the labels.

Check out the bright orange color of the "red giant" stars Aldebaran and Betelgeuse.  The star Sirius is blue white, and the star, Capella, is sort of in between.  All those glowing red areas are glowing ionized Hydrogen gas.  They are known as emission nebulae.  There is a hint of the blue reflection nebula around the Pleiades star cluster.  The constellation names are in Italics.  Star names and nebulae are in normal type.  These images were all shot with a Samyang 14mm lens, on my Canon T1i, that has been modified by Brent Oliver, to make it more sensitive to the red emission nebulae.