For most people it is good news that after Sunday the days become longer. Amateur astronomer and astrophotographer Onno Bloemers from Den Bosch is not happy about this. Then there is less time to take pictures of the stars. Watch the images he takes from his backyard below.
Onno was about eight years old when he got his first telescope. As a little boy he was already captivated by the galaxy. “I would sit on the balcony looking at the moon and the mist,” he says.
On clear nights Onno takes photos of the universe. The number of nights without clouds or rain is limited. The bottom line is that he can shoot twenty to thirty nights a year.
Onno needed eight summer nights to create the photo above. This involves 17.5 hours of exposure that ensures that faint celestial objects become visible. Ultimately, he brings the different photos together by, as it were, superimposing them. This is the ‘Bubble Nebula’. The green is hydrogen, red is sulfur and blue is oxygen.
Where he used to sit behind his stargazer all night long for the perfect picture, he now has one that does the work almost automatically. “Once it’s set up and aimed properly, it takes all kinds of pictures.”
The photo shows the Whirlpool Galaxy in the Hunting Dogs constellation. It is about 25 million light years away. According to Onno, it is one of the most studied and photographed objects in the night sky.
This large spiral galaxy can be seen in the constellation Camelopardalis, about 11 million light years away. Because stars light up, dust and gas nebulae can be seen.
Enough light is needed to clearly visualize objects high in space. The lens on the telescope takes care of this. “The more light you collect, the better the photo becomes,” he says. For a beautiful image, the telescope must be left on as long as possible at night.
This collection of galaxies can be seen in the constellation Berenice’s Head Hair. Every spot in the photo is a galaxy, just like our own Milky Way.
From Sunday Onno will have to take a step back again. It is the winter solstice. From now on, it will get light a little earlier in the morning and dark a little later in the evening. And that means Onno can take fewer photos of the space. “Then I only turn on the telescope for three hours instead of seven,” he says.
In any case, Onno will get behind his telescope again on Sunday night. “Tonight the weather is clear, so everything is ready,” he laughs.
