It ended up in the NASA archive – NRK Vestland

Have you ever tried to photograph the sky with your camera? A glowing sunrise or full moon over the White Mountains doesn't always look good in a photo.

But someone makes it happen.

When the so-called Devil's Comet passed near Jan Erik Valestad Square, he took a photo that was so good that it ended up in NASA's photo archive.

He was Single Who wrote about this first.

How did he do it?

“near-Earth object”

But first a little about the comet. It is gigantic and heading towards our planet.

The correct name is “12P/Pons-Brooks”. NASA classified the comet as a “near-Earth object.”

Because it's so big — in fact, twice as big as the world's tallest mountain — you can get lucky and see it for yourself without a telescope, if you know where to look.

-The picture is incredibly beautiful. We see the comet, and we also see a lot of funny colors on it. We see the beautiful head and tail hanging behind us,” says Josephine Sallis, an astrophysicist at the Birkeland Center at UiB.

Astronomers believe that the reason behind the comet's ejection of gas and dust is “Horna”.

– It's actually only called Satan's Comet because at one point there were two places on the comet where a little bit of excess gas or dust was expelled, so that it looked like it had two horns, just like Satan.

It may be a volcanic comet, but this is a point of contention. Of the 4,000 comets in the solar system, Comet Satan is one of 20 comets suspected of having volcanic activity.

Comets can be seen annually, but comets of this type are rare.

-This comet disappeared far into our solar system. Then comes the 18th, closest to Earth in 71 years. So there may only be a few years in your life where you get the chance to do this. “So this particular photo is very special,” Sallis says.

Even at NASA

– I had a chance, so I had to try, says Falstad.

He initially gave up on photographing the comet, but members of an online forum convinced him that it might still be possible to take good photos from the courtyard at Holsen in Sonnefjord.

With the help of an app, he was able to see how the comet moved. He entered different objects and times, and concluded that he had a time frame of about two hours each evening during the month when the comet would be on its way across the globe.

After six hours spread over three evenings, he finally got the golden pocket.

When he inserted the image into the editing software, he thought he was dealing with a perfectly normal image.

– But I quickly saw that there was something more here. Suddenly the tension was very high.

The photo received enthusiastic reactions and words of praise from all over the world. Perhaps greatest of all is that he ended up doing so APODthe official image archive of NASA.

If more people want to achieve this, a few things are needed, says Valestad:

• Good camera equipment with a fast shutter speed.
• Some skills when it comes to editing.
• A stand on which the camera can stand and follow the Earth's rotation.
• Good planning.
• Some luck.

Don't get nervous thinking about space

– Smile a little. “There's a certain recognition in that, even if I won't sell the skin until the bear is shot,” Valestad says of the accomplishment.

He was fascinated with outer space early on. When he was a little boy, he would lie outside in the snow and just look at what was there.

He grew up on a farm in Veksdalen, completely unpolluted, and the sky on the way to and from the barn was oppressive.

– But I never imagined that it would be possible to do astrophotography here. After all, we don't have exactly the same assumptions as NASA. But it is possible.