The Owl in the Veil (click to embiggen). By Paul Mortfield and Stefano Cancelli
Like the Veil Nebula. A pair of highly cool amateur astronomers named Paul Mortfield, of Backyard Astronomer fame, and Stefan Cancelli of Astro Garage made this image from observations of the Veil Nebula. It was featured on Astronomy Picture of the Day on November 1.
I don’t know about you, but I see a huge flying owl in the expanding cloud of dust and debris that marks the spot where a supernova exploded somewhere between five and eight thousand years ago.
They took their image from their observatories in the Sierra Nevadas of California, using specialty filters and no doubt some image processing to sharpen the view. Red indicates hydrogen gas, blue is oxygen and green is a combination of the two. The whole thing makes for an incredibly beautiful image.
I encourage you to check out these guys and their work at the links above. Amateurs are (as I have always felt) making incredibly good contributions to our appreciation and study of the universe.
The latest in the James Bond series of movies takes a turn toward the astronomical in its choice of locations — the Residencia for astronomers and staff at European Southern Observatory and its Paranal site in the Atacama Desert of Chile. I wrote about this on March 25, 2008, when ESO first mentioned that the moviemakers had spent time doing location shooting for Quantum of Solace at the observatory.
I’ve never been to Paranal, but from my experience at other high desert locations, I would imagine that this was quite an undertaking to shoot at high altitude (Paranal is at 2600 meters — about 8,500 feet) at a working observatory, where work doesn’t stop when the clapper board descends. In addition, the environment around Paranal is quite delicate, and the film crews had to be careful for both themselves and the ecosystem.
The movie opens in theaters in the UK on Hallowe’en and the following week around the world. There’s a podcast at the observatory’s website as well as more information about the shooting and how the Paranal site came to be chosen by the filmmakers. While you’re there, you can explore some of the cosmic wonders that are being observed at Paranal, too!
Filming the new Bond movie at Cerro Paranal, Chile.
