Contains:  Extremely wide field
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South Celestial Pole - Cape Woolamai, Bruce Rohrlach

South Celestial Pole - Cape Woolamai

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South Celestial Pole - Cape Woolamai, Bruce Rohrlach

South Celestial Pole - Cape Woolamai

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Description

The 2 hazy blue patches of light centre/left are dwarf galaxies - the small and large Magellanic Clouds (SMC and LMC) - (with several hundred million and 30 billion stars respectively) - that hang around our Milky Way bound by its gravity. Here I have imaged them wandering around the South Celestial Pole (SCP) the axis of earths rotation (from my visual reference frame). They move around the SCP once every 24 hours due to the earths rotation, i.e. at a lazy half the speed of a watches hour hand which takes 12 hours to rotate 360 degrees. Persian astronomer Abd Al-Rahman Al Sufi wrote about the ‘clouds’ over a thousand years ago, but it wasn’t until explorer Ferdinand Magellan travelled south and wrote about them in the 14th century that their existance became common knowledge – and it’s his name they bear. Imaged from Cape Woolamai, Phillip Island last weekend.

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South Celestial Pole - Cape Woolamai, Bruce Rohrlach