Mind-blowing photo of ‘endless sunsets’ created by student using a BEER can is ‘longest-exposure image ever taken’

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.

The beer-can camera was attached to one of the telescope domes by Fine Art student Regina Valkenborgh in August 2012 – in the week after the closing of the London 2012 Olympics, until finally being opened in September 2020. pic.twitter.com/R4Rdz7XSDO

— University of Hertfordshire Observatory (@BayfordburyObs) December 10, 2020

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.

The simple camera was able to capture the movement of the Sun over eight yearsCredit: Regina Valkenborgh / University of Hertfordshire

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