Astronomers showed a 240 megapixel image of the Big Magellanic Cloud

The Large Magellanic Cloud could be calledquasi-galaxy because it is a hundred times smaller than the Milky Way and rotates around our galaxy as a yo-yo. Since it is 163,000 light-years from Earth, one would think that it would take a space telescope, such as the Hubble, or a huge observatory, to render it to and show our world. But this 240 megapixel image, a fragment of which you see above, and the full version can be found here, with incredibly colorful details, was made by a small Ciel Austral group using a telescope in Chile with a width of only 160 mm.

As you can see, our satellite galaxy looks amazing.

240 megapixels of the Big Magellan Clouds

Ciel Austral is a team of five Frenchamateur astronomers (Jean-Claude Canon, Philip Bernard, Didier Kaplein, Nicolas Outters and Laurent Bourgogne), who own a telescope in northern Chile. The image 14400x14200 was sewn from almost 4000 individual images, which took 1060 hours (6.3 weeks) of expositions from July 2017 to January 2019. It took two computers and eight days to stitch the photos, and another two months took 620 gigabytes of data to process.

If you could teleport to MagellanCloud, it would not look like a beautiful color palette above. Most of the image consists of false colors that show the various elements present in the image. Different colors represent hydrogen, sulfur and oxygen-3, emphasizing high-density cloudy gas nebulae, as would be impossible on a standard image in visible light.

This picture shows the birth and death of stars andtheir consequences, including supernova remnants, planetary nebulae and areas of formation of hot white stars. Along with an improved color version that uses filters to view dust and gas, Ciel Austral also published a narrow-band image that gives a better idea of ​​how the galaxy will look in visible light.

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