This week Picture of the Week transitions back to the night, with a series of images I’m truly very excited to share with you. Essentially since the leaves have fallen off the trees, I’ve been working away at night scenes that display either the fall Milky Way or the winter Milky Way, as pictured above. I found a lot of inspiration last year for night images in the Smokies, and that has carried through until now.
I wanted to start off with this image of Dan Lawson’s cabin in Cades Cove because it represents – I think – my most detailed winter sky yet. To that point, I want to introduce you all to a few night sky objects that you may not have seen before: the Orion – Eridanus bubble, and the Gum Nebula. The Orion -Eridanus bubble is the large red and brown structure that dominates the upper-right portion of the image. This structure encompasses the Orion and Eridanus constellations, as you might guess from the name, and is absolutely MASSIVE in the sky. This particular image was shot at 14mm, and even that wide of an angle view, you can see that the object takes up basically 1/3 of the image. Crazy big.
The next object I want to call out here is the Gum Nebula – named after the Australian astronomer Colin Stanley Gum, which you can see rising up from the mountain tops in the image above. This object is equally as large – perhaps even larger than the Orion – Eridanus bubble, however it is most often associated with the Southern Hemisphere. In the Southern Hemisphere it appears in the sky directly overhead at different times of the year, but here in the Northern Hemisphere, you can only catch it on the horizon for a couple months out of the year. I actually didn’t even know we could see it here until later last year when I noticed it showing up, and so me and some friends decided to try to capture it, and sure enough, there it is! It does actually make it a little higher in the sky than you see pictured here, but not by much. I’m still hoping for an image with it a little higher up, so we’ll see if I’m able to pull that off.
More next week!
–Dan Thompson