Posted on 08/12/2023 11:40:14 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Explanation: It's fun to scribble on the canvas of the sky. You can use a creative photographic technique to cause the light of point-like stars to dance across a digital image by tapping lightly on the telescope while making an exposure. The result will be a squiggly line traced by the star (or two squiggles traced by binary stars) that can reveal the star's color. Colorful lines, dubbed Ghirigori, made from stars found in the northern sky constellations Bootes, Corona Borealis, Ophiucus, and Coma Berenices, are captured in this artistic mosaic. The 25 stars creating the varied and colorful squiggles are identified around the border. Of course, temperature determines the color of a star. While whitish stars tend to be close to the Sun's temperature, stars with bluer hues are hotter, and yellow and red colors are cooler than the Sun.
For more detail go to the link and click on the image for a high definition image. You can then move the magnifying glass cursor then click to zoom in and click again to zoom out. When zoomed in you can scan by moving the side bars on the bottom and right side of the image.
I was making those squiggles, as well as finely tune patterns in the early 80’s with a 5mw SpectraPhysics Helium Neon Laser tube and a bit of first surface mirror mounted off center on a speaker’s cone with a little pyramid of double sticky foam tape.
Using a home made battery powered high voltage power supply, I would bounce the beam off the mirror onto things like “El Capitan” in Yosemite.
(It “danced” to the music.)
It would be a long time before I could downsize that system with a pocket laser pointer.
It looks like Hunter painted it.
Pro Tip:
To get controlled patterns from a telescope when trying to make images like those, stick a small speaker onto your scope, and gently drive it with musical chords.
$500K and it is yours.
My first attempt at photographing a planet ended up like that, Had I known it was going to be a “thing”, I would’ve kept doing it.
It looks like a bunch of neon lights.
Apod really puts out absolute crap from time to time. This is a perfect example of such.
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