H E A V E N L Y

A selection of astrophotography captured at Heavenly Bodies Studio.

Prints available below;

Etsy: Heavenly Bodies Art

https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/HeavenlyBodiesArt

My book describing a selection of my astro images and how they are captured and processed is available for free download at https://tinyurl.com/yc5t67kp

This album shows some of my favourite astro images that I have captured since late 2020.  The nebulae shown here are diffuse clouds of inter-stellar gases and dust within our Milky Way galaxy. Some of them are huge, spanning hundreds of light years across. Areas where the gases and dust become dense enough will collapse under their own gravitational attraction, forming stars which ionise the surrounding gases with intense UV radiation, causing them to fluoresce at specific frequencies, and illuminate the dust clouds, making these nebulae visible with a telescope and long exposure photography.

Other nebulae are the result of a giant star's life when it runs out of fuel and explodes in a supernova event, throwing off material that expands outwards as a shock wave travelling at millions of kilometres per hour, compressing and heating interstellar material as it goes, causing it to glow.

Taking detailed images of faint nebulae and distant galaxies is not an easy task. To start with, these things are extremely faint such that all but the very brightest cannot be discerned with the unaided eye. Long exposure photography taken through a telescope solves that problem, capturing light photons over many minutes or hours to integrate into a visible image.