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Juan Carlos Munoz Photography

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Antofagasta
Juan Carlos Munoz Photography

Astrophotography and landscape photography by Juan Carlos Munoz Mateos

Instagram: instagram.com/astro_jcm
Twitter: twitter.com/astro_jcm

01/01/2022

After a lot of careful planning and some failed attempts, I finally managed to photograph these two storks watching the sunset in my hometown, Don Benito (Spain). Canon 6D + Tamron 100-400mm. Planned with Photopills.

15/02/2021

Here’s the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds over the four Auxiliary Telescopes at ESO’s Paranal Observatory. The light beams captured by the ATs are channeled via underground tunnels into a lab, where they are made interfere with each other. This allows us to reconstruct images with the same level of detail of a huge mirror as wide as the separation between the telescopes. In this particular image only 3 ATs were being used together.

There’s also some faint red and green airglow close to the horizon. Airglow is light emitted by atoms and molecules in the atmosphere; in this case hydroxyl (red) and oxygen (green). Airglow is invisible to the naked eye, but it shows up in images and spectra, and must be removed prior to any scientific analysis.

09/02/2021

This is an 8-month long exposure of the VISTA telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory. I took it with a pinhole camera designed and built by Diego López (https://www.facebook.com/Solarigraphy2010/). The bright stripes mark the ever-changing path of the Sun throughout the year. Dark stripes are due to cloudy days; not many of those at Paranal!

The low arc to the right marks the winter solstice, when the Sun is lowest on the sky and therefore days are shorter and colder. The arc to the left corresponds to the summer solstice; the Sun is then much higher up, and days are thus longer and hotter. The rightmost band is brighter because I didn’t take this pic exactly from solstice to solstice, so the Sun passed twice over that area.

I planned this picture with , to ensure I could capture both solstices in the field of view. Diego then scanned the photosensitive paper inside the camera. Check out his webpage (http://www.solarigrafia.com/solarigrafia_solarigraphy/Solarigrafia_Solarigraphy.html) and Instagram feed () for more pics like this one!

26/12/2020

The Magellanic Clouds behind Auxiliary Telescope 3 at Paranal Observatory, with some rather intense airglow. Red airglow is emitted via the rotation & vibration of hydroxyl molecules in the atmosphere. It's not visible to the naked eye, but it does show up in pictures and astronomical data. A little quiz: can you guess what’s that bright spot to the left of the Small Magellanic Cloud?

Canon 6D + Tamron 45 mm f/1.8, 10 s, ISO 6400

21/12/2020

Today the Sun reached its lowest point in the sky in the Northern hemisphere, and the highest one in the Southern hemisphere. From now on days will get increasingly longer in the North, and shorter in the South.

A couple of years ago I managed to capture this yearly variation in the Sun's altitude with a pinhole camera that I placed at Paranal Observatory. This camera has a tiny hole that projects an image on a sheet of photographic paper. I left the pinhole open for eight months, and as the Sun moved it left a burned imprint on the photographic paper.

The camera was facing west. The lowest arc to the right corresponds to June 21, the winter solstice in the Southern hemisphere, when days are shorter.

As days go by, the Sun sets further South each day, moving towards the left on this image. The leftmost arc corresponds to the summer solstice, when the Sun's maximum elevation is so high that it doesn't fit within the field of view of this image.

The dark bands correspond to cloudy days, which luckily for us are very rare at Paranal ;-)

The pinhole camera was manufactured by my colleague Diego Lopez, a photographer based in Madrid who pioneered this technique. Check out his Instagram page (), for more images like this one!

13/07/2020

Turns out that photographing a low altitude comet from a city in the bottom of a valley is not a good idea 😅 This is comet NEOWISE from downtown Heidelberg, right after sunset last night.

There were street lamps everywhere, so I didn't have a lot of freedom in terms of composition. Also, I didn't have my tripod. All my stuff is on its way here from Chile. So I had to aim the camera by resting it over my folded jacket. Not an easy way to frame the comet!

I could barely see the comet by eye due to all the light pollution in the city center, but I'm nevertheless happy with how the i.age turned out.

And you, have you seen or photographed NEOWISE yet?

Canon 6D + Tamron 100-400 mm at 135 mm f5.6, 29 x 3.2 s ISO1600

04/05/2020

Took a trip down memory lane and re-edited some of my old pics. This one is from 2016, when a team of visiting astronomers was using the SINFONI instrument to monitor the orbit of the G2 cloud around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

This cloud has been observed over the last few years by several groups, using both ground-based telescopes like VLT & Keck, and space ones like Chandra or XMM. Modelers have tried to figure out if it's just pure gas or if there's also a star in there.

If you want to learn how we use this kind of lasers in astronomy, I explained it in this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/astro_jcm/status/1248640837086560257

Canon 6D + Rokinon 14 mm f/2.8, 30 s, ISO6400

10/04/2020

I took this picture of ESO’s UT4 telescope back in January. You may have read that we use lasers to correct atmospheric turbulence, but how does this work exactly? And why do we need several lasers rather than just one?

We can monitor how targets twinkle and then use high speed deformable mirrors to counteract this turbulence. But this requires taking 1000s of images per second, so your target can’t be too faint. If it is, then you need to have a bright star next to it to do the correction. But bright stars are rare, so what do we do if there isn’t one next to the target we want to observe? We create one! By shooting a laser tuned at a specific frequency we can excite sodium atoms high in the atmosphere. These atoms then glow, creating an artificial “star”.

The problem is that this “star” is only 80 km away, so its light doesn’t pass through the same portion of the atmosphere as the light from the astronomical target. By using more than one laser we can probe the turbulence at different elevations without missing information. This technique will become even more relevant for upcoming behemoths like the Extremely Large Telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope, and the Giant Magellan Telescope.

05/04/2020

Just because we're in lockdown doesn't mean I have to give up photography. I'm lucky enough to have an apartment facing East, with gorgeous views of the Andes. The air has been particularly clean the last few days, so I decided to take a telephoto panorama of El Plomo, a 5400m peak in the Andes.

Canon 6D + Tamron 100-400 mm at 400mm, f/8, 1/320 s, ISO 100. 9 shots stitched together

24/02/2020

Roberto Castillo, one of our engineers and a train buff, is leading the restoration of this lovely wagon, donated by FCAB. It will serve as a museum showcasing pieces of astronomical technology used at Paranal. I took this pic a few days ago, with the Milky Way rising behind it.

FCAB stands for “Ferrocarril de Antofagasta a Bolivia”, and it’s a company that has been operating in the north of Chile and Bolivia for almost 150 years, transporting mostly minerals.

Canon 6D + Rokinon 24mm f/2 20s ISO 3200

27/01/2020

Every once in a while clouds pay us an unwelcome visit at Paranal. This can ruin our observations, but on the other hand we can enjoy amazing Moon halos like this one I saw in November.

These haloes are created by hexagonal ice crystals in the atmosphere. Incident light rays are refracted twice inside the crystal, and come out most of the time at 22º relative to the incident rays. When light from the Sun / Moon go through a myriad of small ice crystals, most beams emerge at 22º, and you’ll thus see a bright ring of this size. The inside of the halo is dark because beams can’t be refracted at less than 22º. The inner part of the halo looks red because ice crystals don’t refract red light as strongly as blue light.

For a more detailed description of what’s going on, check out this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/astro_jcm/status/1221835742214868993

17/01/2020

I took this image two nights ago at Paranal Observatory. It's a 10 second exposure at ISO 6400 with a Canon 6D and a Tamron 45 mm f1.8, with a diffraction grating in front of the lens. The grating decomposes the light of every source in the frame into its constituent colors.

I’ve highlighted a few interesting objects. For instance: the stars Sirius and Rigel emit way more blue/violet light than Betelgeuse. That’s because their surface temperature is 10,000 degrees, much hotter than Betelgeuse’s 3,500 degrees.

The M42 star-forming region shows distinctive blobs at certain colors. That’s because different atoms (hydrogen, helium and oxygen in this case) emit energy at very specific wavelengths.

Finally, you can also see the four lasers that we use to correct the atmospheric turbulence. The lasers are tuned to a specific wavelength to excite sodium atoms high up in the atmosphere. Due to this, their spectra only shows this particular wavelength, rather than a continuum of colors.

I hope you like it! There's more information and discussion here:

https://twitter.com/astro_jcm/status/1217871538910912512

Dirección

Antofagasta

Página web

http://www.sc.eso.org/~jmunoz/

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