Thursday, February 28, 2008

Starry Starry Nights


It's that moonless time of the month and the stars are shining here on Bonaire. Pierre and I went down to the south end on Tuesday and saw lots of great Milky Way stars and star clusters between the clouds.

Sandra and I went south last night and had absolutely cloudless skies most of the time between 8pm and 11pm.Here is a picture of the Milky Way from last night. These represent three minute exposures at ISO 800 and F4.5. I accidentally shot one 5 min. exposure and it was way better. So we'll be back to take a bunch of longer exposures if we can sometime.
At the lower left corner of the picture is the eta Carina nebula and some open clusters around it.
To the upper right of that stuff, you can see the false cross and a couple open clusters near it.

Continuing to the right, about where the notches are is the area of Puppis, and a number of small clusters.
To the upper right of the middle is Sirius and the stars and star clusters around Canus Major.

Orion can be found at the upper right end of the photo.

I've posted a really large scale version of this picture so you can zoom in and see the details if you want to and if you don't mind a 1 meg file size.

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