#gegenschein — Public Fediverse posts

Photographer Spends Night on Freezing Mountain to Capture Rare Triple Galaxy Arch https://petapixel.com/2026/05/08/photographer-spends-night-on-freezing-mountain-to-capture-rare-triple-galaxy-arch/ #astrophotography #milkywaygalaxy #gegenschein #matterhorn #Spotlight #panoramic #Features #angelfux #milkyway #equinox #Space #alps

.. annotated version of previous post

Three Sky Arches over Snowy Alps
* Image Credit & Copyright: Angel Fux
https://www.angelfux.com/
https://www.levoyageur.ch/women-invited/angel-fux

Comment by Angel Fux on Instagram:

"It took months of planning, three nights of acclimatization at 3,100m, a window that nearly disappeared twice because of wind, a bank holiday that grounded helicopters, a pilot found last minute on the Italian side of the border, temperatures around minus 25°C, a night that got windier than forecasted, and forty hours of editing with a process I had never used before.

What I set out to capture was the double Milky Way arch, the only night of the year where both arms of the Milky Way are visible above the horizon. The winter arch first, then the summer arch carrying the galactic core, from a summit with a view of the Matterhorn that almost no one ever sees.
What I didn’t plan for was the Gegenschein, a rare counterglow caused by interplanetary dust reflecting sunlight, appearing as a third faint arch crossing the frame. A triple arch, in the end.

The final image is a tracked panorama built from over 260 individual exposures: 17 panels for the winter arch and 16 for the summer arch, each panel a stack of 4 frames at 40 seconds, supplemented with H-alpha data, plus 32 landscape shots at nautical twilight. The working folder came to around 300GB.

I am deeply grateful to @lehnerrichi and @arnaudlehner , who made this safe and possible, and to @begibakar_travel , who taught me the processing workflow that brought this image to life. And big thank you to my loved ones for their endless support."

📍 Dent d’Hérens, Swiss Alps, 4,200m

https://www.instagram.com/p/DWbq_YKjW0X/

#space #earth #zodiacalLight #gegenschein #astrophotography #photography #NASA #science #physics #nature #education

2026 April 21

Three Sky Arches over Snowy Alps
* Image Credit & Copyright: Angel Fux
https://www.angelfux.com/
https://www.levoyageur.ch/women-invited/angel-fux

Explanation:
Why are there three arches across the sky instead of two? Last month, after being dropped off by a helicopter at a high mountain peak in the Alps near the Swiss Italian border, an adventurous astrophotographer expected two arches of our Milky Way galaxy to be visible during the night. These were the inner arch looking in toward the center of our galaxy on the left, visible just before sunrise, and the outer arch on the right visible just after sunset. But there were three arches. The surprised astrophotographer soon realized that the sky was so dark that an entire arc of faint zodiacal light was also noticeable -- sunlight scattered by inner Solar System dust. And it artfully connected the two Milky Way arches! The next morning a helicopter picked the astrophotographer back up, and after 40 hours of processing and combining that night's images, the featured triple-arch 360-degree panorama resulted.
https://blog.angelfux.com/p/triple-arch-at-4200m-matterhorn
https://youtu.be/rxeK5Q2N-Is?t=617
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alps
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy
https://science.nasa.gov/asset/webb/milky-way-and-our-location/
https://capturetheatlas.com/best-time-to-see-the-milky-way/
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap251109.html
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap220312.html
https://www.levoyageur.ch/women-invited/angel-fux
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200408.html
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap170429.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiacal_light
https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/solar-system/#/home
https://www.instagram.com/p/DWbq_YKjW0X/

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260421.html

#space #earth #zodiacalLight #gegenschein #astrophotography #photography #NASA #science #physics #nature #education

Saturn Opposite the Sun

This year Saturn was at opposition on September 21, opposite the Sun in planet Earth's sky. At its closest to Earth, Saturn was also at its brightest of the year, rising as the Sun set and shining above the horizon all night long among the fainter stars of the constellation Pisces.

Image Credit & Copyright: Jin Wang

#astrophotography
#Saturn
#gegenschein
#airglow
#APOD

2014 January 14

The Gegenschein Over Chile
* Image Credit & Copyright: Yuri Beletsky (Las Campanas Observatory, Carnegie Institution)

Explanation:
Is the night sky darkest in the direction opposite the Sun? No. In fact, a rarely discernable faint glow known as the gegenschein (German for "counter glow") can be seen 180 degrees around from the Sun in an extremely dark sky. The gegenschein is sunlight back-scattered off small interplanetary dust particles. These dust particles are millimeter sized splinters from asteroids and orbit in the ecliptic plane of the planets. Pictured above from last year is one of the more spectacular pictures of the gegenschein yet taken. Here a deep exposure of an extremely dark sky over Las Campanas Observatory in Chile shows the gegenschein so clearly that even a surrounding glow is visible. Notable background objects include the Andromeda galaxy, the Pleiades star cluster, the California Nebula, the belt of Orion just below the Orion Nebula and inside Barnard's Loop, and bright stars Rigel and Betelgeuse. The gegenschein is distinguished from zodiacal light near the Sun by the high angle of reflection. During the day, a phenomenon similar to the gegenschein called the glory can be seen in reflecting air or clouds opposite the Sun from an airplane.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140114.html

#space_related #space #gegenschein #astrophotography #Photography #mountains #science #physics #nature #Space_Culture_Club