Have you ever tried to capture the sky with your camera? A glowing sunrise or a full moon over white mountains does not always look good in the picture.
But someone makes it happen.
When the so-called devil’s comet came whizzing past Jan Erik Vallestad’s yard, he took a photo that was so good that it ended up in Nasa’s image archive.
It was A parting who wrote about this first.
How did he do it?
“Near-Earth Object”
But first a little about the comet. He is gigantic and headed in the direction of our planet.
The proper name is “12P/Pons-Brooks”. NASA has classified the comet as a “near-Earth object”.
Because he is so big – in fact twice as big as the world’s highest mountain – you can be lucky and see him yourself without a telescope, if you know where to look.
– The picture is incredibly cool. We see the comet, and we also see a lot of funny colors on him. We see the head and a nice tail hanging behind, says Josephine Salice, who is an astrophysicist at the Birkeland Center at UiB.
“Horna” can be blamed on the comet spewing out gas and dust, astronomers believe.
– Calling it a devil’s comet is actually only because at one point there were two places on the comet where a little extra gas or dust was flushed out, so that it looked like he had two horns, just like the devil.
It may be a volcanic comet, but this is the point of disagreement. Of the 4,000 comets in the solar system, the devil’s comet is one of 20 that is suspected of having volcanic activity on it.
Color data has been added to the picture, tell the photographer.
Photo: Jan Erik Vallestad
Comets can be seen annually, but those of this type are rarer.
– This comet disappeared far into our solar system. And then comes the eighteenth, closer to Earth in 71 years. So there may only be a few years in your life where you get the chance to do so. So this particular picture is quite special, says Salice.
Even up at Nasa
– I got an opportunity, so I had to try, says Vallestad.
He had originally written off photographing the comet, but was persuaded by the members of an online forum he is part of that it might still be possible to take good pictures from the yard at Holsen in Sunnfjord.
With the help of an app, he was able to see how the comet would move. He entered various objects and times, and concluded that he had a time frame of approximately two hours every evening during the month the comet is on its way past the globe.
After six hours spread over three evenings, he finally got a golden pocket.
The hobbyist photographer is not stressed by thinking about outer space – although he probably could be if he tried.
Photo: Private
When he put the picture into the editing program, he thought he was dealing with a completely ordinary photograph.
– But I saw quite quickly that there was something more here. Suddenly the tension was very high.
The picture has received enthusiastic reactions and words of praise from all over the world. Perhaps the biggest of all is that it ended up in APOD, the official image archive of Nasa.
If more people want to make it happen, some things are needed, says Vallestad:
- Good camera equipment with a fast shutter speed.
- Some skills when it comes to editing.
- A stand on which the camera can stand and follow the earth’s rotation.
- Good planning.
- A bit of luck.
This is a pure luminance image without noise processing to take care of the finest details, says Vallestad. Luminance is where you collect a broad spectrum of light to get the most possible signal and less noise.
Photo: Jan Erik Vallestad
Don’t be stressed by thinking about space
– I smile a little. There is a certain recognition in that, even if I am not going to sell the skin until the bear is shot, says Vallestad about the achievement.
He was early fascinated by outer space. As a little boy, he used to lie down outside in the snow and just look at what was up there.
He grew up on a farm in Viksdalen completely without pollution, and the sky on the way to and from the barn was overwhelming.
– But I had never imagined that it would be possible to do astrophotography here. After all, we don’t have exactly the same assumptions as those at Nasa. But it is possible.
2024-03-16 16:13:46
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