The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has published a striking image taken in Chile’s Atacama Desert. It shows stars rotating around the South Pole.
Our Earth rotates around its axis, which creates the effect of the daily rotation of the stars. They describe circles around the point where our planet’s axis of rotation passes in the sky. It is called the pole of the world and coincides with the direction of the geographic north/south. In the Northern Hemisphere, the stars move counterclockwise, and in the Southern Hemisphere, they move clockwise.
Astrophotographer Osvaldo Castillo managed to capture this hypnotic movement above the Paranal Observatory. It is located at the top of Cerro Paranal, in the Atacama Desert in Chile. The top of one of the Very Large Telescope’s auxiliary units almost perfectly coincided with the South Pole, creating the impression that the sky was rotating around the telescope.
To capture these circular star trails in all their glory, Castillo had to work hard. Even a slight shift can completely ruin the result, as the final image only becomes visible after the individual images are combined. And since the telescope moves as it focuses on different points in the sky, different shots had to be taken for the foreground and background.
Castillo shot with a long exposure for several hours, taking nearly 300 photographs. Fortunately, his calculations and southward orientation proved accurate, giving us an image of astonishing beauty.
Earlier, we reported on an impressive photograph by astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy, who captured a skydiver flying against the backdrop of the Sun.
According to ESO
