Winter's Milky Way & Counterglow


Date & Time: Nov 19 2009, from 24:38 to 25:24 JST(+0900)
Composed 8 shots with 6 minutes exposed
Optical: SIGMA 15mm EX Fish-eye F2.8, Aperture: F3.3
with IDAS LPS-P2-FF Light-pollution suppression filter
Auto-guided with Kenko SKYMEMO Equatorial
Digital Camera: Nikon D80 (Remodeled)
Location: Ooizumi, Hokuto city, Yamanashi pref.

Camera Settings: Recording Format...12bit CCD-RAW, converted to 16bit TIFF(3872 x 2592)
CCD Sensitivity...ISO800


I have captured the southern winter's skies with a fish-eye photo lens. You can appreciate winter constellations and dimmed Milky Way on left hand side of the picture.
At about lower right edge of the image, you can detect a very very faint lump of light with a diameter of 20 degrees or so around just south of the Pleiades. It's extraordinary unreliable light almost being concealed behind the light pollution, this dimmed light is called the "Gegenshine (counterglow)". Counterglow is the dispersed solar light by fine particles distributed along the ecliptic, observed at the opposite point of the sun.
The light of counterglow is fainter than that of zodiacal light or Milky Way, so it's getting more difficult to observe it year after year at Japan.
Reversed image of counterglow Reversed image of counterglow

  A reversed and emphasized image of upper picture.
The Counterglow is lying around the intersection of two black lines.



Winter's Milky Way & Zodiacal light
Winter's Milky Way taken with whole-sky camera

Copyright(c) 2009 by Naoyuki Kurita, All rights reserved.
To top page To Milky Way index