Way back when I was a teenager, my bedroom walls were covered with astronomy and space program posters. I had a poster of the Viking Lander from Martin Marietta, and numerous astronomical posters from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. One of my posters was the Sagittarius Star Cloud – a beautiful splash of stars, with large regions obscured by lanes of dust.
I remember staring at that poster in awe at the vast number of stars, knowing that they were incredibly far away from us, as well as far away from each other! Yet, there are so many stars there, they literally form a cloud. So many stars, so many places, so many possibilities.
The Vatican Observatory Foundation had a wonderful summer intern this year; I threw numerous ideas for social media posts at her – one of them was the Sagittarius Star Cloud. I asked Br. Guy if the VO had any images of it, and that started a quite the email thread! It turns out that Claudio Costa, a recent guest for our Full Moon meetup, did have some images of it taken from Rome, and he’d be willing to take another with his new telescope. Yes, please!
Here are the first image Br. Guy sent to me:
Once again, I found myself staring in awe at Sagittarius Star Cloud; this time, the dust lanes really caught my attention. What I find astounding is that many of the dark and redder regions would be just as bright as the brightest star-filled regions, were it not for all the dust. Even now, I don’t think I have a proper appreciation for the amount of dust in our galaxy…
Here’s Claudio’s newer image with his new RedCat telescope:
Equipment used: William Optics Redcat71 and QHY268c camera on Rainbow Astro RST mount. 97x15s exposures. No autoguiding. No flat field. SharpCap Pro in LiveStack mode.
Image processing packages: Nebulosity 4, Photomatics Pro, Iris, Win10 Photo Editor and finally Canon Digital Photo Professional.
Immediately, this quote came to mind:
“My God, it’s full of stars!”
Astronaut David Bowman from the book: “2001: A Space Odyssey”
