Aman Chokshi said he was walking along the coast of Neill Island, India, last month, when he noticed a faint bright patch along the horizon. He wrote:
I’ve always believed that the Large Magellanic Cloud was only visible from the Southern Hemisphere. My sky map showed that the Large Magellanic Cloud was barely 10 degrees above the horizon, below the bright star Canopus. I immediately set up my camera, and took a long exposure to see if I could capture it.
The sky was lit with brilliant airglow, within which a bright density of stars. So thrilled to have shot this!
By the way, Aman also said:
I shot this using an old Canon film lens, 50mm f/1.4 stopped down to f/4. The sky is a stack of 90x8s images, while the foreground is a stack of 3x30s images. I manually aligned the reflected stars in the tide pools, in Photoshop.
Deborah Byrd created the EarthSky radio series in 1991 and founded EarthSky.org in 1994. Prior to that, she had worked for the University of Texas McDonald Observatory since 1976, and created and produced their Star Date radio series. Today, she serves as Editor-in-Chief of this website. She has won a galaxy of awards from the broadcasting and science communities, including having an asteroid named 3505 Byrd in her honor. In 2020, she won the Education Prize from the American Astronomical Society, the largest organization of professional astronomers in North America. A science communicator and educator since 1976, Byrd believes in science as a force for good in the world and a vital tool for the 21st century. "Being an EarthSky editor is like hosting a big global party for cool nature-lovers," she says.
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