Rocket fuel dump
Taken by Jonathan Green on March 30, 2015 @
Pakiri, New Zealand.
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Camera Used: Unavailable Unavailable
Exposure Time: 20/1
Aperture: Unavailable
ISO: 3200
Date Taken: 2015:04:08 22:30:12
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Details:
The first thing you might notice in this panorama is a strange bright object near the center of the image, it kind of looks like a weird bright Magellanic cloud, the object in question is in fact a fuel dump from a Chinese Long March rocket, when I first spotted the event it was so bright I thought I was witnessing a Supernova! but after a while I noticed it wasn't moving with the stars but was enigmatically drifting slowly down to the horizon, the whole event took place over half an hour on the 30th of March from 14:30 - 15:00 UTC. In all my years of doing astronomy and astrophotography I had never seen anything like it before, so for me this was in the truest sense of the word a U.F.O! thankfully after doing some research the next day and with a whole lot of help from my Facebook friends we confirmed the identity of this mysterious object as being the fuel dump from a Chinese Long March rocket that was carrying a satellite called Beidou-3 M1.
The panorama is made up from 20 x 20 sec exposures captured with a Canon 6d at ISO3200 through a Samyang 24 mm lens set at f/2.8 all mounted on an Gigapan EPIC Pro panoramic tripod head, the images were then stitched and blended in PT GUI PRO and final processing was completed in Photoshop CS5
Photographer's website:
http://https://www.facebook.com/AotearoaAstrophotography
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