Eta Corinae Nebula Rising Over Cerro Pachon - Chile
I've made about five or six different versions of this shot, but none of them fully satisfied me until this one. To make the sky I combined 20 15-second exposures and layered that against a single foreground image from the set. The aspect ratios are preserved as well as the orientation of the sky with respect to the horizon.
In this image one can find the constellation Crux (aka Southern Cross), the Eta Corenae Nebula, various open star clusters. The massive fuzzy patch rising above the horizon from bottom right to upper left is the Perseus Arm of our Milky Way galaxy. The two bright stars above the lower right horizon are Beta-Centuri (aka Haden) and Alpha Centuri (aka Rigel Kent). The dark splotches in the sky are not photographic imperfections; they are clouds of dust so dense they block the light of stars behind them. Every star in this picture belongs to our own Milky Way - just like our Sun.
On the ridge at bottom left one can see the silhouettes of the Southern Astronomical Research Telescope (SOAR); the Southern Gemini Observatory, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which is under construction at the time of this image (2016).
