Astronomy Picture of the Day -- The Milky Way from a Malibu Sea Cave

NASA ^ | July 07, 2015 | (see photo credit)

[SunkenCiv]

Explanation: What’s happening outside this cave? Nothing unexpected – it’s just the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy passing by. As the Earth turns, the band of our Galaxy appears to rotate and shift along the horizon. The featured image was taken by a photographer who professes a passion for locating sea caves, and who found this spectacular grotto in Leo Carrillo State Park near Malibu, California, USA. After some planning, he timed this single shot image through the 10-meter high cave entrance to show the Milky Way far in the distance. In the foreground, several rocks about one meter across are visible. Visible in the background starscape are millions of stars including the relatively bright and orange Antares, situated just to the right of the image center.

[SunkenCiv]

[Credit and Copyright: Jack Fusco]

[SunkenCiv]

The Big One

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[mitch5501]

Awesome SC! thankyou.

[Mr. K]

I LOVE the APOTD!

[ETL]

Wow! Very nice.

[ETL]

[left that other site]

That is really beautiful.

Although I don’t comment on every picture, I really appreciate these daily posts, Dear Sunken Civ

[KoRn]

A nice pic, but NOT worthy of an APOD....

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks for the kind remarks!

[SunkenCiv]

I liked it, but it looked too much like a cut-and-paste, or something synthetic like the excellent stuff on Digital Blasphemy.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks!

[MEG33]

So Beautiful!!

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

I know that cave. It’s at Leo Carillo State Park.

[ETL]

I liked it, but it looked too much like a cut-and-paste, or something synthetic

Most astro-pics, as I'm sure you know, are not as one actually sees the object with the naked eye, but rather the result of long time-exposures: keeping the scope trained on the subject to collect light over a long period of time. The light eventually builds up on the plate and becomes intense. Other astro-pics (from large professional scopes like Hubble, etc) are composites of various EM frequencies (besides standard optical), such as infrared, ultraviolet, ..., combined to appear as a single image. They also typically exaggerate colors, or arbitrarily assign colors to various EMR (electro-magnetic radiation) frequencies.

[ETL]

I liked it, but it looked too much like a cut-and-paste, or something synthetic

Actually, minus some of the color, the view seen here is not too much different than what one would see with the naked eye in really dark skies.