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 ⇐   May 10th, 2009   ⇒ 

Copyright 2009 Michael Anttila

We are back from our Honeymoon! As most of you know, Angela and I got married on May 9th this year, and on May 11th we hopped on a plane to New Zealand for three weeks!

Now that we are back, I can bring my Picture Of The Week up to date. I was too busy at the wedding to take any pictures, and I don't have the professional photos back yet, so I will start right in to posting photos from our honeymoon. Hopefully I will have time to post a photo every few days until I catch up.

So, one of the things I was really looking forward to seeing in New Zealand was the night sky. I've never been in the southern hemisphere before, and it will probably be a while until I am there again, so I figured this was my only chance to see things like Alpha Centauri (our closest neighbouring star system) and the Magellanic Clouds (our closest neighbouring galaxies). We were incredibly lucky that the one clear night that we had in New Zealand also coincided with a time when the moon was not in the sky and we were at Fox Glacier in the mountains, so we had one excellent night of stargazing!

This is a photo of Angela and I gazing out at the sky outside of our motel room at the Rainforest Motel. The bright star directly to the right of my nose is Alpha Centauri. To the right of that (past the other bright star) is the Southern Cross. The milky band through the center of the photo is obviously the Milky Way. The large smudge in the center below it is the Large Magellanic Cloud, and the small smudge below and to the left of that is the Small Magellanic Cloud. None of these objects are visible from Canada (except for different regions of the Milky Way), so it was really exciting to see them for the first time!

Technical details: This image was taken with my Rebel XT + Peleng 8mm fisheye at 8mm, ISO 1600, f/3.5, for 30 seconds.

Comments

Very cool!
-- Aravind at 9:48pm, Thursday June 4, 2009 EST

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