The Zodiacal Light

A mysterious zodiacal light can be sight at the season of the spring equinox. The weather and the sky prepared for us an absolutely excellent spectacle during last weekend and we was able to view the zodiacal light for the first time!

We made three journeys to Rojetin's airport. At first evening, we did sight some lights above west's horizont, but we did understand that we did sight the zodiacal light after that it disappeared. Also, we made some photos but with ISO 600 only so all images are underexposed and noisily. Our second journey was the most successful. Horrible clouds has dissolved and we sight clearly the zodiacal light with help of our fresh experience. Our last journey started really optimistically because the sky has no clouds for whole day. Unfortunately, an atmospheric front moved to west's horizont and it did scatter a light over the zodiacal light. We did not sight anything.

The first image shows the zodiacal light during our second journey. The zodiacal light is a white difuse part of sky below Pleyades (rightly). A head of Taurus is at center of the image, Orion is on the left. Do you know where a white dwarf can be found? The image was acquired at 2008-03-30, 18:05 UT, EOS 30D, f/2.8 fish-eye, ISO 1600, 32 sec and processed by Ufraw+dcraw (histogram equalisation, wavelet denoising) and Gimp (unsharp, resize). The camera configuration and processing is common to all related images (larger).

Next two images recorded a passage of the ISS and Jules Verne spacecrafts during evening of 2008-03-31, 17:39 UT (the same camera configuration). I prepared two versions of the image in a large format (I believe) useful for wallpapers.

I dedicated, inspired by Paulie, the 31's evening to made a sequence of horizont-centered exposures. Unfortunately, clouds has been brighter than the zodiacal light.

Thx to all peoples of my team: Janis, Petoš, Barča, Ushas, Maceška, Jarda, Janapka, Kočka, Fantom, Ondratik and Paulie.