Spectra around Orion - a photo on Flickriver

I took this image last night at Paranal Observatory, where I work as a staff astronomer. It's a 10 second exposure with at ISO 6400 with a Canon 6D and a Tamron 45 mm f1.8, with a diffraction grating in front of the lens. The grating decomposes the light of every source in the frame into its constituent colors. I edited the image in Lightroom and Affinity Photo. Editing consisted in improving contrast via a curves adjustment, increasing the saturation and some defringing to remove haloes around the stars.

For convenience I've highlighted a few interesting objects:

- Rigel, Sirius and Betelgeuse. Rigel and Sirius emit much more blue/violet light than Betelgeuse. This is because their surface temperature is 10,000 K, much hotter than the 3,500 K of Betelgeuse.

- M42. This is an active star forming regions, and its spectrum exhibits some of the typical emission lines of these regions: hydrogen lines (H_alpha, H_beta, H_gamma), neutral helium, and some forbidden oxygen lines.

- Four laser beams. These lasers are used by one of our telescopes to excite sodium atoms high up in the atmosphere, creating four artificial "stars" that we then use to measure and correct the atmospheric turbulence. The lasers happened to be in front of Orion from where I took the shot. Because these lasers are tuned to a specific frequency, their spectra (to the right) just show up at this particular frequency.

I hope you like it! There's more information and discussion here:

twitter.com/astro_jcm/status/1217871538910912512

Taken on: January 15, 2020

Tags:

paranal

vlt

large

telescope

lasers

orion

night

night photography

nightscape

stars

starry

constellation

spectra

atacama

observatory

very large telescope « less

Groups appears in: • Night Images • Chile more » • Astronomy • Night Photography Group • Your ESO Pictures • APOD Submissions • Astrophotography - The Solar System and Beyond « less

Camera: Canon EOS 6D, f/1.8, 10 sec, 45mm, ISO 6400 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon EOS 6D
Lens:	TAMRON SP 45mm F/1.8 Di VC USD F013
Aperture:	f/1.8
Exposure Time:	10
Focal Length:	45mm
ISO:	6400
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Manual
Exposure Mode:	Manual
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5.0 (Macintosh)
Show full info

Stats: 6,294 views / 14 comments

go back

close tools panel

Badge creator

Use Flickriver Badge Creator to create a badge linking to your photos, your group or any other Flickriver view.

You can place your badge on your Flickr profile, Blog or Website.

Add to your iGoogle or Netvibes page

Flickriver widget for iGoogle or Netvibes can display almost any Flickriver view - most interesting today, by user, by group, by tag etc. Once added to your personalized homepage, just edit widget settings to select your desired view.

Clickr on one of the buttons below to install:

Embed on your Web site

To embed this view, Copy and Paste the following HTML code:

Black background (preview):

White background (preview):

Firefox and Chrome addons

Adds a 'Flickriver' button to your browser. While viewing any Flickr photos page, click on this button to open the same view on Flickriver.

Install in Firefox
Install in Chrome

Search plugin

Add 'Search on Flickriver' to your browser's search box. Works with Firefox and Internet Explorer. Install search plugin

"View on Flickriver" Greasemonkey script

A Greasemonkey script that adds Flickriver links to various Flickr photo pages - user photos, favorites, pools etc, allowing to quickly open the corresponding Flickriver view.

Also, allows quickly viewing any Flickr photo on black background in large size.

Install "View on Flickriver" script

Bookmarklet

While viewing any Flickr photos page, click on the bookmarklet to open the same view on Flickriver.

To install: drag and drop the following link to your Bookmarks toolbar.
IE users - add the link to your Favorites under the Links folder