All pictures were taken with a T2i. You can find details about the the settings I used to take each shot in the caption of each image. These pictures aren’t modified or edited except for size and cropping.
On October 24th last year, I finally made it out to a Pennsylvania park called Cherry Springs. Cherry Springs is most notable for its International Dark Sky Park status. Because of its remote location, high altitude, and the fact that neighboring towns are all in valleys, it has remarkably little light pollution. It’s the first American Dark Sky Park, and the darkest spot in the eastern United States. It seems we can’t compete with the barren wastelands of the West.
I arrived at around 8, when it was already dark, set up my tent and met a few astronomers that were more serious than me. I took a couple of mediocre shots, and started to notice a red tinge around the Milky Way.
f/3.5, 30s exposure, ISO 3200, 10mm focal length
Terrified that something had gone wrong with the sensor in my camera, I asked one of my new friends if I could take a few shots with theirs. The tinge was there on their camera as well. I was confused, trying to figure out what would cause that to happen. While I was taking a picture of the Pleiades, I noticed a streak of red light coming up from the forest.
f/7.1, 30s exposure, ISO 6400, 10mm focal length
(You can also see Jupiter to the right of the red glow and a plane to the right of that.)
The streak turned out to be part of an aurora, which lasted about an hour during its most intense and continued to tinge the sky red all night. I’m not exaggerating when I say that it was one of the most gorgeous things I’ve ever seen.
f/7.1, 30s exposure, ISO 6400, 10mm focal length
This particular aurora was seen as far south as Missouri, which is pretty strange for an aurora. Later in the night, Orion rose, and I was able to get some pretty stellar (heh) shots of Orion too.
f/3.5, 90s exposure, ISO 800, 18mm focal length
When I showed this to a friend who’s pretty into astronomy, he shared some cool insights. If we look near Orion’s genitals, we can see that there is a bright red nebula between his legs.
He showed me a real picture of the nebula, from a proper NASA telescope, and I put them side-by-side.
Even though I understand that space is a place, and that it really should always look the same when we get images of it, it still blows me away that the picture my amateur dSLR can capture what is so clearly the same thing as a serious telescope with a serious image sensor. Maybe that’s naïve, but it’s also beautiful.
