A BEER can placed over a telescope and then forgotten about for eight years may have created the longest-exposure photo ever taken.
A Master of Fine Art student at the University of Hertfordshire created a simple pinhole camera with a beer can and photographic paper and then left it on a telescope at Bayfordbury Observatory in England.
Eight years and one month later the efforts of photographer Regina Valkenborgh were discovered.
The image shows 2,953 arced trails of the sun all caught on the photographic paper.
Long-exposure photos are great for capturing the movement of an object through time.
Lots of photographers use the technique for things like meteor showers.
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Valkenborgh now works as a photography technician at Barnet and Southgate College.
She said: “I had tried this technique a couple of times at the Observatory before, but the photographs were often ruined by moisture and the photographic paper curled up.
“I hadn’t intended to capture an exposure for this length of time and to my surprise, it had survived.”
Part of the telescope’s dome features on the left of the photo.
German artist Michael Wesely is was previously thought to be responsible for the longest-exposure image ever taken with a shot that took four years and eight months.
The potentially new world record holding photo was discovered by Bayfordbury Observatory’s principal technical officer David Campbell.
Valkenborgh said: “It was a stroke of luck that the picture was left untouched, to be saved by David after all these years.”
A pinhole camera can just be a lightproof box with a small hole in it so a beer can is effective.
It doesn’t need a lens and works by light shining through the hole and onto photographic paper inside.
An inverted image is then projected onto the paper.
The Sun – all the facts you need to know
What is it, why does it exist, and why is it so ruddy hot all the time?
- The Sun is a huge star that lives at the centre of our solar system
- It’s a nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, and provides most of the energy for life on Earth
- It measures a staggering 865,000 miles across – making it 109 times bigger than Earth
- But its weight is 330,000 times that of Earth, and accounts for almost all of the mass in the Solar System
- The Sun is mostly made up of hydrogen (73%), helium (25%) and then a number of other elements like oyxgen, carbon and iron
- Its surface temperature is around 5,505C
- Scientists describe the Sun as being “middle-aged”
- The Sun formed 4.6billion years ago, and tt’s been in its current state for around four billion years
- It’s expected that it will remain stable for another five billion years
- It doesn’t have enough mass to explode as a supernova
- Instead, we expect it to turn a hulking red giant
- During this phase, it will be so big that it will engulf Mercury, Venus and Earth
- Eventually it will turn into an incredibly hot white dwarf, and will stay that way for trillions of years
Astonishing new high resolution images of the sun’s surface are the most detailed ever taken
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In other news, the only total eclipse of 2020 darkened skies across Latin America this week.
Britain is to launch a spacecraft next year in a mission to ambush a comet and unlock mysteries of the universe.
And, Nasa has announced its first team of astronauts that will be heading for the Moon.
What do you think of the long exposure Sun image? Let us know in the comments…
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
