A Celestial Rendez-vous

Lights from ... the Milky Way over Blanco 4-meter telescope

For my last night under the Chilean starry sky, I had decided to turn my creativity on and test everything I could think of. This photo was part of this. Despite its gigantic height, the 4-meter-Blanco telescope is still a dust compared to the vastness of the Universe. Here, the milky way is like a border we can’t cross, a horizon we can’t reach. Also, the bright orange dot, planet Mars was the objective of the picture too, almost perfectly aligned with 47 Tucanae, the Small and Large Magellanic clouds. Notice the pretty intense airglow activity which gives an overall orange veil in the sky. The reflection of the galactic bulge and mars can be seen onto the dome of the observatory.
The picture was taken from CTIO (AURA/NSF), and is a 14-stitched-picture panorama. Single 15 seconds exposure without star tracker.

The total resolution of this image is 110 Megapixels (not visible on this version) 

The Blanco telescope was the first 4-meter telescope ever built in Chile (1974). It is part of the larger Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, located atop a 2700-meter mountain and owned by AURA institution. Still today, this big optical monster makes great strides in astronomy, and is not hiding in the shadow of its other friends (or enemies). Currently, the Blanco telescope is well known for 2 of its most powerful instruments:

• a 520 Megapixels camera (DECAM) aimed at studying how the dark energy interacts with deep space.
• a multi-object spectrograph enabling to analyse the chemical composition of several stars simultaneously.

Technical Details....

📷 Canon Rebel T5i + Sigma Art 18-35mm f/1.8 lens + Standard Tripod
→ 14 stitched pictures to build this panoramic view.
→ Single 15 seconds exposure
→ ISO 3200
→ 18 mm
→ f/1.8
Softwares: Dxo Optics pro 9 for noise reduction / Lightroom for all the edits / Microsoft ICE for the final stitching.