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orion-nebula
The European Southern Observatory — a bottomless reservoir of mind-blowing space photos — issued a challenge last October to amateur astronomers everywhere: Find the best photos that ESO's professional image processors overlooked.
The results are in. The ESO announced the best astrophotos dug from its archives in the "Hidden Treasures" competition.
Contestants had to start with raw, grayscale data taken with one of the observatory's constellation of telescopes, which includes the Very Large Telescope (actually four separate telescopes working together), VISTA, APEX, the La Silla Paranal Observatory and ALMA. After correcting the image for distortions and unwanted signatures of the telescope, contestants could process or enhance the raw data however they wanted, short of painting directly on the image.
ESO got about 80 submissions, and selected 10 winners based on the "quality of the data processing, the originality of the image and the overall aesthetic feel." The grand prize winner, Russian astrophotographer Igor Chekalin, will get a free trip to the Paranal Observatory in Chile and a chance to participate in an observing run.
You can sift through the whole set of photos on flickr. Here are some of our favorites.
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Images: ESO/Igor Chekalin.
Orion Nebula
The watercolor-like portrait (above) of the Orion Nebula was processed by Russian astrophotographer Igor Chekalin. The image was captured in early January 2005 with the Wide Field Imager camera on the 2.2-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. The nebula gives astronomers a close-up view of a stellar nursery, where stars are born from condensing clouds of dust and gas. ESO has also released its own reprocessed version of the same data (below).
Images: ESO/Igor Chekalin.See Also:
