360° Panorama over La Silla Observatory - #MeetESO




Lights from ... the Southern Sky over the ESO-3.6m-telescope

In July 2019, I lived one of my most memorable astronomical experiences. Along with 7 other astronomy fans from all around the world, we spent a whole week in Chile communicating on sciences for the European Southern Observatory ESO. We were selected by ESO in November 2018 as part of the social media event #MeetESO

To celebrate this once-in-a-lifetime experience, I share with you this first astrophotograph taken from La Silla Observatory on July 1st 2019, the day just before the eclipse. The dome we see here is home to the ESO's 3.6-m telescope, well know for its exoplanet instrument HARPS.

During that night, some of us who were interested in night photography had a special tour with ESO's astrophotographers Petr Horalek and Mahdi Zamani. What an honor to join them for few hours at La Silla! Plus, in our MeetESO team, we had Eric Benedetti, who is a talented astrophotographer too.

This picture is also my very first attempt at capturing a 360-degree-panoramic view! Honestly, I jumped out of my desktop's chair when I realise the stitching process has actually worked on my computer. I was not sure at all it will end up working since the equipment I used was totally brand-new and I had never taken a single night picture with it prior to that night! Indeed, my very first night using a full frame DSLR with a 14 mm lens!

The image shows the whole celestial sky as we could observe it with our eyes. The galactic bulge was straight up over head. The zodiacal light (faint long cone of light) and a strong activity of airglow gave a special colorful touch to this magical sky.
Indeed, all the orange/red veil in the sky is caused by a natural phenomenon called Airglow. It is a chemical reaction produced by the ultraviolet radiation from the Sun hitting particles of our atmosphere. As this process is very slow, all the radiation absorbed during the day is slowly interacting with sodium, and oxygen of the Earth's atmosphere and released colored light by night.
Orange or red airglow is very typical from Chile, as you can see in the other pictures available on this website.

The overall panorama has a 125-Mega-pixel resolution.

Technical Details....

📷 Canon EOS 6D + Sigma Art 14 mm f/1.8 lens + Standard Tripod + standard Ball head
→ 13 stitched pictures to build this 360° view.
→ Single 20-second exposure
→ ISO 6400
→ 14 mm
→ f/2.8
Softwares: Dxo Optics pro 9 for noise reduction / Lightroom for all the edits / Microsoft ICE for the final stitching.

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