Dubai, United Arab Emirates (CNN) — Cosmic wonders of vast space inspire many photographers around the world, to take pictures that astound everyone who sees them.
Kuwaiti astronomer Abdullah Al-Harbi was able to capture a stunning image of a nebula surrounding a Wolf-Rayet star in the Salmi desert in Kuwait.
Al-Harbi seeks to shed light on the field of astrophotography, spread astronomical awareness in Kuwaiti society, and encourage individuals to go through his experience, to make the State of Kuwait a beacon for astrophotography enthusiasts, as he told CNN in Arabic.
Al-Harbi refers to the prevailing belief that the phenomenon of light pollution in cities is a deterrent to astronomy and astrophotography amateurs, and prevents viewing and photographing relatively faint objects, such as the “Wolf-Rayet” nebulae and other celestial bodies, stressing that it is a wrong belief.
As expected, it was not easy to take such a picture, as Al-Harbi was able to come up with this result following regarding 10 days of filming.
He explains: “The filming took 10 days, during which I photographed regarding 20 hours as a total of data, and I chose the best and clearest 8 hours from it.”
And the sight of this gas bubble, which was formed by the stellar winds that moved the gas emitted from the atmosphere surrounding the star “WR 134”, Al-Harbi recalls, saying that it was “very faint with almost hidden contours, which is a challenge posed by imaging in light-polluted areas.”
Nevertheless, Al-Harbi points out that some gas clusters in the nebula were surprisingly visible, specifically the remnants of the supernova, which were dazzlingly visible in the range of hydrogen gas.
And the Kuwaiti photographer saw this astronomical scene as an eye with its details, from the pupil to the eyebrow, as if it was staring at us from the sky, so he called it “the eye of the sky.”
In addition to their beautiful and strange shapes, the “Wolf-Rayet” stars are extremely rare, and they were named following the French astronomers Charles Wolfe and Georges Wright, who discovered them at the Paris Observatory in 1867, and the world knows only 500 of this type in the Milky Way, in addition to a few hundred In the surrounding galaxies, according to the Earthsky website.
Al-Harbi pointed out that in order to document such snapshots of nebulae, he uses equipment dedicated to astrophotography, such as an astronomical camera and an equatorial tracker (which reverses the movement of the Earth’s rotation to allow photographing nebulae for long hours without a withdrawal in the stars), and he also used optical filters. They allow certain spectrums of electromagnetic waves emitted by ionized gases to pass through space.
Al-Harbi’s passion for astrophotography began for the first time when he was fascinated by the astronomical images that he saw everywhere on the Internet, whether through social media or dedicated astronomical sites such as NASA or search engines in the astrophotography section, but he thought that photographing them was limited to specialists in this field.
Al-Harbi recalls: “One day, I went on a stargazing trip organized by the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences, and there I met the astronomer, Mohammed Al-Obeidi, who guided me to the right path to enter the field of astrophotography.”
From that moment on, he started learning and researching astrophotography, until he reached a professional level in this type of photography.
Over the course of regarding a year and a half, Al-Harbi succeeded in documenting more than 27 nebulae of various types, including reflection nebulae, emission nebulae, dark nebulae, and other supernova remnants, pointing out that some of these images were published as “picture of the day” on affiliated pages. to the American Space Agency “NASA”.
The snapshot won admiration and praise from his followers on social media platforms, which made him feel that he was closer to achieving his desired goal of making Kuwait a destination that attracts astrophotography enthusiasts.
