Corona Australis - the Southern Crown

This glimpse into the universe is Southern Hemisphere deep sky object, Corona Australis. It's latin name means 'Southern Crown'

Corona Australis contains one of the closest star-forming regions to the Solar System

This image is a combination of over 70 raw images obtained from a profesional institution-grade telescope located high on a mountain in Chile. For this image I rented time on a Planewave 24 inch telescope in El Sauce Chile from Telescope.live and specified the target area of the sky I want and how many of what type of raw images I want.

When you take a photo, your camera shutter is only open for a fraction of a second, but astrophotography is different. This deep sky object is soooo dim that it required the camera shutter to be open for 5, 10 or 15 minutes at a time.

The colors in this image are created by high energy radiation from the stars Alpha and Beta Coronae Australis illuminating the surrounding gas and dust clouds (a bit like Neon lights). The blue colors are prodced by energised Oxygen gas.

Separate raw images are captured for each of the Red, Green and Blue wavelengths of light. These files can get quite large, it's not uncommon to capture 3 to 5Gb of data for a single image.

This raw data is then processed using specialised astronomical software (similar to what the Hubble team use) to produce the image you see here.

The photons from this star creation process have travelled over 430 years to grace my camera and now your wall.