Winter Deep Field

As seen on Astronomy Picture of the Day move the slider on the image, to see how the night sky has much more than could be viewed with the naked-eye. Photographed in this image of only few second exposure, are winter stars as appeared above the house of TWAN photographer and Sky&Telescope editor Dennis di Cicco. The prominent figure of Orion is obvious right above the house and Sirius, the brightest star of the night, is at lower left, while Taurus and the Pleiades star cluster are at upper right. The second layer represent the very deep view of winter sky, a mosaic image made by total exposure of 40 hours through a camera lens and an astronomical CCD camera, from the same location as the house image in suburban-Boston, north east USA. The deep image presents the extent of an enormous deep-sky feature known as the Orion-Eridanus Superbubble. As noted by the photographers “we’re also experimenting with the best way to create a mosaic covering such a large section of sky. This is a particularly daunting task, not only for many hours of exposures needed, also because of very long processing time to accurately create the mosaic from many individual frames.” For closer look at this stunning deep view of winter sky you can download a 3-megabyte image from here. Read more about this fascinating experiment on the April 2009 issue of Sky&Telescope and on the magazine’s website.