Alan Friedman of Buffalo, New York is an amateur astrophotography enthusiast who captures amazing photographs of the Sun through a telescope in his backyard. His highly detailed photographs show the sun in ways you never see with your naked eye. Using special filters that allow the photos to be captured without destroying his camera or his eyes, Friedman creates images of our life-giving star that look more like something you might see under a microscope. Read more…
Behold, a photograph of the moon. Can you see it? No, it’s not that tiny bright crescent you see… The moon is that faint giant crescent. That tiny one to its left is Venus. Hungarian astrophotographer Iván Éder captured this beautiful photograph back in 2004 from Budapest, Hungary. Read more…
The space agencies that run the Hubble Space Telescope may have some of the most powerful photographic equipment at their disposal, but every now and then they can still use a little help from amateur astrophotographers.
Amateur astrophotographer Robert Gendler created the beautiful photograph above showing the spiral galaxy M106 by compositing existing imagery captured by the Hubble telescope with his own photos captured from Earth. Read more…
Astrophotography enthusiast Don Marcotte wanted to find out whether the Canon 6D or Canon 5D Mark III was more suitable for his area of photography, so he pitted the two cameras against one another in a few noise tests at his local camera store. He simply shot long exposures without any light (the cap was on) in order to see how much noise would show up in the frame. Read more…
Back in September, we shared the first photos snapped by the world’s largest and most powerful digital camera: the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera located on a mountaintop in Chile. Reuters recently paid a visit to the massive astro-camera and the scientists behind it, and created the short 2-minute piece above that offers a closer look at the unique piece of camera equipment. Read more…
Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory in Chile have released a breathtaking new photograph showing the central area of our Milky Way galaxy. The photograph shows a whopping 84 million stars in an image measuring 108500×81500, which contains nearly 9 billion pixels. Read more…
An apparent meteor struck Jupiter yesterday, creating an explosion so massive that amateur astronomers looking through their telescopes her on Earth were able to see it. Amateur astrophotographer George Hall of Dallas, Texas happened to have a camera and telescope pointed at the planet at the time, and managed to snag some video footage of the fireball, which he soon uploaded to his Flickr account. Read more…
Capturing a single shooting star can make for a brilliant photograph, but what does it look like if you composite multiple meteors into a single image? Fort Collins, Colorado-based nature photographer David Kingham decided to find out recently during the ongoing Perseid meteor shower. The amazing photo seen above is what resulted. Read more…
At first glance, the images in Fabian Oefner‘s Nebulae might look like images of distant galaxies captured with a space telescope. They were actually shot in a studio using a number of fiber glass lamps. Oefner used exposures of different lengths to capture the ends of the lit fiber glass as points and streaks of light. He then combined multiple images into single photos to achieve the “star density” seen in the final images. Read more…
“Science can be beautiful. Art can be scientific.” This latest episode of the PBS series Off Book, titled “Seeing Beyond the Human Eye“, looks into how science and photographic techniques are helping transform how we see the world.
Technology defies the boundaries of human perception. From photomicrography to astrophotography, size and distance are no longer barriers, and through slow-mo and timelapse, we are allowed to see time and humanity in a new light. Through our curiosity and thirst for the unknown, the beauty of the universe can now be explored beyond the limits of the naked eye.
