The Making of a Mind-Blowing Space Photo

[n2doc]

By Alexis Madrigal October 6, 2009 | 8:43 am | Categories: Space



One late night in 2007, Rogelio Bernal Andreo and his wife were driving down Highway 1 along California’s Lost Coast, when his wife opened the moon roof. What spread out above them looked nothing like the mauve sky near their Sunnyvale home.

“It was like the Milky Way was in front of us,” said Andreo, a former early eBay employee, who runs a Spanish-language internet company. “It looked like it was gonna fall on us.”

He pulled out his digital SLR camera and spent two hours trying to capture the vast galaxy. When he got home, he downloaded the photos, and caught the astrophotography bug.

“I started to look on the internet and see all these pictures, really gorgeous pictures,” Andreo said. “I said, ‘How do people do this?’”

Two years of intensive study, rigorous practice, and perhaps $10,000 of equipment later, he knows. And he let Wired.com in on his process. Step-by-step, we’ll break down how he went from the black-and-white star scene below to the mind-blowing space photo above.

more:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/making-space-photo/

[harun]

1. Cool

[AlecBGreen]

2. awesome!

:bounce:

[leveymg]

3. "Objects may be closer than they appear" - that must be some aperture on that moonroof.

[OneBlueSky]

4. contemplating the vastness of the universe always makes me feel insignificant . . .

the small piece of Creation that we occupy is but a dust mote in the grand scheme of things . . . gotta believe that we're not alone -- and leave open the possibility that we may have been visited by others . . .