About
Here you might get a glimpse of the wonderful celestial objects our eyes cannot see, but that can be captured on camera after sufficiently long exposures.
I make use of different optical devices, with their appropriate computerized mounts, and of a variety of dedicated astronomical cameras and filters, to collect the light coming from these objects. Photons that, by accumulating for different hours on a camera digital sensor, and after appropriate photographic processing, compose the images as we see them.
You will find here pictures of “deep-sky” targets, that is mostly nebulas and galaxies, accompanied by just a very brief description of each image. Comprehensive descriptions of these amazing objects can be found in many excellent resources in the web. Here you will also find, near to each image, a link to a web repository where detailed informations about the instruments, light acquisition strategy and softwares I used, can be found, in case you are interested. All pictures were taken from Monte Argentario, Italy.
This is a “work in progress”, as new images will be uploaded in the gallery as soon as they will be ready. Also, some of the images here will get better after additional data acquisition or reprocessing, as long as new techniques and photo-processing wizardries will be implemented to extract as much information as possible from each photon that is collected.
The photons that form these images come from very far, thousand or millions of light years away. They traveled this incredible amount of time at the speed of light, before ending their journey on my camera sensor. You will find here information about the distance of each of these objects from Earth. Astronomical distances are commonly expressed in light years. But how long a distance is 1 light year? To grasp this concept, you might perhaps consider that the fastest human-built spacecrafts can reach the speed of 600,000 km/h. At this amazing speed, the spacecraft would take 1,800 years to cover the distance of just 1 light year. These photons made it through a long journey. Although photons do not experience space or time, they bring us informations about a long gone past. They deserve respect.
