Southern Sky

First place in the 2022 IAU OAE Astrophotography Contest, category Time lapses of celestial patterns.

This video is a compilation of several recordings taken on various occasions in June 2019, both on Easter Island and in the Atacama Desert in Chile. It starts with an impressive opening of clouds seeming to emerge behind the famous statues on Easter Island and moving directly forwards towards the observer. It evokes the impression of the mighty deities sending clouds to cover the night sky.

In the next couple of scenes, we see landscapes with an impressive Milky Way turning overhead, but this quiet scene is continuously interrupted by hasty satellites or — in one of the scenes — even by car lights on the ground. It illustrates both the majesty of the sky and the disturbance of nature by human influence.

Then there is another scene of clouds passing by, but now from left to right. The terrestrial clouds pass below the clouds of stars that form the Milky Way. The last scene shows an undisturbed still pattern of stars that looks like a flight over a zoomed-in photograph, and shows how we are not used to experiencing nature’s stillness and silence.

Credit: Jianfeng Dai/IAU OAE (CC BY 4.0)