Dec 29th, 2016: I See Stars

[xoxoxoBruce]

Damn, they must have taken some pictures from telescopes, or the Space Station, and photoshopped some mountains on them.


.......NOPE!

Photographer Sandro Casutt lives in a remote Swiss village with unbelievable views of the Andromeda Galaxy. The village of Vals,
population 990, is a prime location for viewing the closest major galaxy to the Milky Way. Thus, Casutt, together with his brother
Markus, started Cosmic Art Photography two years ago as an outlet for their love of the universe.

Owner of a tattoo parlor by day, Casutt spends his evenings hunting for the perfect sky. The resulting photographs, which are
shot during different seasons, give incredible views of the Andromeda in all its glory. The galaxy, the largest of a cluster of 54
galaxies known as the Local Group, is 220,000 light years across and is expected to collide with the Milky Way in 4.5 billion years.
And while the Andromeda is the closest to us, we’re still talking about 2.5 million light years away from Earth.

I remember camping along the Colorado River, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, in August when the Milky way was overhead.
With an absence of light pollution the view was amazing, greater than I'd see anywhere else. I suppose I could have seen a lot of
stars in the wilds of Alaska but there was too much light pollution from the Aurora Borealis.

A lot more pictures at the link

[Snakeadelic]

I call minor shenanigans! I've been reading Astronomy Image of the Day for years, plus surfing their entire archive back into the late 1990s when .gif images built dot-by-dot by detail-crazed coders were the big thing in images, which is why I can say I've seen enough sky pics to call shenanigans.

The mountains are real, and the lighting is accurate for late-night long exposure photos. The skies are real...but everything is the wrong size. And color--nebulae only go that kind of vivid pink/red when filters are applied to identify elements (usually hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen). The one with the dirty orange-ish splotch, that's what most nebulae look like without filtering. Not all, but most.

And I'm pretty sure the Andromeda Galaxy is not that visually large from anywhere on Earth. Maybe someone who's not half dead from some viral crapola in the wake of too many antibiotics can do an archive search on APOD to see if I'm right about that.

[glatt]

Andromeda galaxy "angular diameter is 178x63 arc-minutes.". And the moon is roughly 30 arc-minutes. So this looks twice as thick as the moon and six times as wide.

If a telephoto lens was used and it was close to the horizon, the sizes could work.

But I am also sceptical. Camera sensors have come a long way, but they can't capture that much light without a long exposure. And a long exposure would require tracking the stars, so the mountain would get motion blur.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I screwed up that link, it should be.

[Gravdigr]

Nice pics.

Photoshoppery abounds, but, nice pics.