Skyglow over South Africa

Markus Pössel from the German Haus der Astronomie recently returned from South Africa, and realized that some of the photos he took nicely demonstrate the effect of skyglow. What's really great about the photos is that they not only have the same camera settings, he also set up the shot to be of the same part of the sky. He gave me permission to re-post the photos from his SciLogs post here.

He took three photos and overlaid them one above the other. The top photo shows the sky over Grahamstown (population 70,000). The middle photo has the same settings as the top, but was shot in Sutherland, near the South African Astronomical Observatory. The bottom photo is the same location as the middle photo, but with an exposure time twice as long to reveal more details.

An example of light pollution by Markus Pössel is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The top two photos have identical camera settings,
the bottom photo had an exposure time that was twice as long.

The area of the sky that was photographed. The Southern
Cross is at the bottom. Constellation overlay via astronomy.net

You can get the full resolution version of the images at Markus's SciLogs post.


If you have a good image about skyglow or lighting, please send it to me, and I'll share it on the blog! You can see the entire light pollution photo series by clicking on the "view from your app" label below.