Daniel Adibi has been fascinated with capturing images of space for years. His image of the Virgo Galaxy Cluster wowed scientists at NASA and was featured as the Astronomy Picture of the Day on Thursday, April 17.
"I was very excited when I found out. It was great to be recognized for a hobby I've taught myself over the past two years, to which I dedicated countless hours," shared Daniel.
Daniel snapped the image in late February after traveling to the dark skies near Franklin, West Virginia. The galaxy is the nearest large galaxy cluster to the Milky Way.
"I pointed my telescope at the target for almost the entire night, gaining about six hours of data, which I processed later to turn into the image," explained Daniel. "After capturing the target, I learned about NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD), which is a competition that allows people to submit their astronomy photos for review."
Daniel used a computerized telescope and a cooled camera to capture the images. "When I go to image, I align the telescope with the North Celestial Pole (right next to the Pole Star), and from there, I can move the telescope to the coordinates of a given object and track it throughout the night to get extremely long exposures," said Daniel. "I take multiple five-minute exposures of the target throughout the night, stack them together, and carefully process the resulting data to get a final image."
The selected image contained six hours of integration or total exposure time.
