That may sound impressive, but the truth is that photographing an aurora requires very little persuasion. The sky glows. Curtains of light ripple across the horizon. Every few minutes something changes and you find yourself grabbing the camera again.
Auroras are show-offs.
It was patiently photographing the Large Magellanic Cloud.
For more than three hours it gathered light, one thirty-second exposure at a time. By the end of the night it had collected 411 images. The result is this week’s photograph.
I have been looking at the Large Magellanic Cloud for most of my life. Like many southern hemisphere astronomers, I have pointed a telescope towards it hundreds of times.
I thought I knew it.
Yet the more I look at this image, the more I see.
Dark rivers of dust wind across the galaxy. Pink clouds mark vast regions where new stars are being born. Brilliant star clusters glitter throughout the frame. What appears to the eye as a detached patch of mist turns out to be something else entirely.
The pale cloud is about 170,000 light-years away. Its light began its passage to Earth long before the first cities were built. What we casually call a cloud is, in reality, a galaxy in its own right, containing billions of stars.
Europeans attached Magellan’s name to the cloud after his expedition crossed southern oceans five centuries ago. However, people living beneath southern skies had known it for countless generations before European sailors ventured far enough south to notice it.
Here in New Zealand we are unusually fortunate. The Large Magellanic Cloud never sets. In winter it rides high overhead. In summer it drifts lower in the southern sky. But it is always there.
Perhaps that is why we overlook it; familiarity can be a surprisingly effective blindfold.
But the telescope has no such problem. It simply keeps looking.
Given enough time, familiar things reveal unexpected depths.
Last Friday, while I was distracted by one wonder, another was quietly waiting.
It has been there every night of my life. I am only just beginning to notice it.
