While the summer Milky Way (as seen from the Northern Hemisphere) seems to capture most people’s attention, and is frankly far easier to photograph, there are some absolutely humongous and interesting structures in the winter skies. This past winter (welcome to spring, by the way!) I have really fallen in love with the Orion end of the Milky Way, and am a little sad to see it go for a while. Given that, I thought I’d spend a little bit of time in celebration of these huge objects!
Back in January I shared an image of the Dan Lawson cabin in Cades Cove with part of the Gum Nebula starting to rise above the mountains, and I commented how excited I was to capture it. The Gum Nebula (named after astronomer Colin Gum) is only partially visible above the horizon for a few hours during our winter months, and is typically associated with the Southern Hemisphere, where it can be observed in its entirety. Well, after the Dan Lawson image I set out to capture it more completely, and I was successful! I have to images I want to share of it, this week’s and one more.
This week’s image shows most of what we can see of it here in East Tennessee. It does rise a little more, but starts to tip to the side, making it challenging to edit. What I really like about this image though is it shows the objects absolute massive scale. This particular image was shot at 24mm, which means the moon would be about the size of an eraser head on the full screen version of the image – perhaps smaller even. So by comparison, this thing is SO HUGE!
More next week!
–Dan Thompson