NORTH MEETS SOUTH
It might get a little dizzy looking at this photo! This image from the European Southern Observatory Week, ESO, simultaneously captures both the northern and southern hemispheres (the entire night sky in one mind-blowing image), something that would be impossible to see in real life.
To create this image, photographers Petr Horálek and Juan Carlos Casado took two photographs in observatories located at the same latitudes in the northern and southern hemispheres. Upper half is a photo taken at the Roque dos Muchachos Observatory of the Canary Islands Astrophysics Institute in La Palma (Canary Islands, Spain), 29 degrees north of the equator, while the lower half was taken at ESO's La Chair Observatory, in the Atacama Desert (Chile), 29 degrees south of the equator. Digitally linked, they create a seamless panoramic view of the night sky.
One of the most notable features of this image is the mysterious white glow that radiates vertically from its center. It is the zodiacal light, a phenomenon visible only in areas with extremely dark skies, free from light pollution, caused by the dust that permeates our Solar System and that scatters sunlight. Shining brightly in the beam of northern hemisphere zodiacal light, we see the planet Venus.
The bottom image shows several of La Chair's telescopes, including the ESO one-meter Schmidt Telescope in the foreground. The upside-down reflective mirror in the upper image is part of the CTA (Cherenkov Telescope Array), a set of gamma-ray telescopes that observe some of the most energetic phenomena in the universe. A second set of telescopes will be installed in the southern hemisphere, close to ESO's Paranal Observatory, thanks to an agreement between the CTA Observatory and ESO.
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Image credits: P. Horálek & J. C. Married / ESO
Text credits: Kleper Observatory on Facebook
