By mark eggleston | 2023-02-18
On 02/18/2023 07:15 pm by Garth Battista| Halcottsville NY (Catskill Mountains)
Zodiacal light under the full Milky Way arc. Zodiacal light is a reflection of sunlight on interplanetary dust in our solar system. It's visible with the naked eye on spring evenings in the west an hour or two after sunset.
The yellowish light on the horizon to the left is just light pollution from the metro areas southeast of us: Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, and probably some from the vast light dome around NYC.
Wikipedia: "The zodiacal light is a faint glow of diffuse sunlight scattered by interplanetary dust. Brighter around the Sun, it appears in a particularly dark night sky to extend from the Sun's direction in a roughly triangular shape along the zodiac, and appears with less intensity and visibility along the whole ecliptic as the zodiacal band. Zodiacal light spans the entire sky and contributes to the natural light of a clear and moonless night sky."
Sky and Telescope wrote: "As you take in the sight, consider that you're gazing at the single largest visible structure in the solar system created by some of its tiniest members — dust motes!"
This image is a large panorama: 32 individual panels (8 across and 4 high in landscape orientation) and each panel was shot twice for stacking to improve light gathering, reduce noise, and allow a light-pollution reduction. It spans a view from the northwest on the right all the way to the southeast on the left (facing southward), and from ground level up past the zenith.
I should add that this image contains many jewels of the winter night sky: Orion and Barnard's Loop, the Rosette Nebula, the Hyades and the Pleiades, Mars, the California Nebula, the Heart and Soul Nebulae, the North America Nebula, the Andromeda Galaxy . . . And the bright "star" that appears in the base of the ZL is Jupiter.
Sony a7iii astro-modified by #spencerscamera
~ Sigma DC DN 16mm lens
~ f/1.6
~ ISO 1000
~ 20 seconds per frame.
64 separate frames. 2 frames per panel stacked on Sequator with a medium (3 out of 5) light pollution reduction.
Panorama of 32 stacked panels stitched in Microsoft ICE.