Exposure Time: 1,060 Hours

This image is the result of a project by a team of five amateur astrophotographers who left their camera shutters open for 1,060 hours, which has to be some kind of record. That's 44 days! The photograph shows the Large Magellanic Cloud, 163,000 light years away.

The image is a mosaic made of 16 smaller fields of view, which, once stitched together form a high-resolution image of 204 Million of pixels! As of matter of fact, this is not the work of a single person but by a team of five french amateur astronomers called "Ciel Austral":  Jean Claude CANONNE, Philippe BERNHARD, Didier CHAPLAIN, Nicolas OUTTERS et Laurent BOURGON.

"Ciel Austral" owns a remotely-controlled observatory located in the most prestigious skies of the planet, in Chile, and more precisely at the El Sauce Observatory (Coquimbo Region). A 160-mm APO-refractor telescope and a Moravian CCD were used to obtain this wonderful field. The datasets were taken over several months, ranging from 2018 and 2019. The heavy files handled represent 620 GB and needed few hundreds of hours to get out of the image processing step! Once stacked together, they make up the stunning figure of 1060 hours of exposure.

Read more about the image at AstroSpace. You can see high-resolution versions of the image at Ciel Austral's gallery. Be aware that they may take some time to load, but it will be worth it just for the opportunity to zoom in and explore the details.  -via Metafilter


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