Castor and Pollux are the brightest stars in the constellation Gemini, the twins. Here you can see their distinctive colors. Can you tell which one is which?
PS: Not coincidentally, the 3 panes mosaic was captured with my "twin" FSQ telescopes!
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A classic from my collection gets a facelift. There's a story told by this image that isn't quite obvious.
This was my first time setting foot on Glacier Point, back in 2013. I was already fairly skilled at deep-sky imaging but my experience as a nightscaper was only a short amount of hours (as opposed to thousands today)... And yet, in later visits to GP I produced nice pics but not quite where this one sits, IMHO. Not only that, while there's hundreds of nice images of GP at night, I can count only a handful that I'd consider really unique or skillfully crafted (that's my personal taste, YMMV).
What's the story then? IMHO, it tells me that nightscape photography is often about the moment, about what's happening around you and how you're reacting to it. Skills, location and many other things matter, especially you being there to capture whatever is happening, but more often than not, it's the moment. Obvious? Perhaps, but to me it's actually interesting, as it is the complete opposite of deep-sky astrophotography, my other big passion, where time (mostly) appears still, night after night, year after year.
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Horse Tail Falls (Yosemite) during the "firefall" peak.
February 14, 2017
Tags: Firefall Horsetail california Yosemite
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Dramatic 180 degrees panoramic view of the often calm-inspiring Milky Way above the rough inferno cause by the RIM fire (west of Yosemite) in the distance. Not exactly the type of "sky colors" (deep or otherwise) I like to see, though.
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Back in 2010 I captured a wide-field mosaic of the Rho Ophiuchus area that overtime became one of my "signature" deep sky images (you can see it here tinyurl.com/rhoopfb )... I captured that image with broadband filters - in plain language, the colors of the rainbow. A few days ago, checking some data and sky surveys, I noticed that in this area there were also some very clearly delimited nebulosity emitting light in the very narrow Hydrogen Alpha band that however were not showing in my original image - or in many of other images of this area. So, during the last few days I spent the last hours of the night capturing H-Alpha data in this area. I integrated this data with the previous image and voila! Nebulosity that was invisible in my previous image, suddenly appeared.
The "new" emission nebulosity is most apparent, as you can see, in the left area of the image, particularly around the stars Delta Scorpii (SH2-7) and Pi Scorpii (SH2-1). Interesting, isn't it?
Check the entry on my page for a peek at the before/after versions: www.deepskycolors.com/archivo/2014/03/18/the-Surprise-Neb...
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