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NASA will publish a film by a Czech author on Monday, it was taken two years ago

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has once again captivated Petr Horálek’s photographs, and on Monday he will publish his film entitled “Perseids of Perseus”. It is a night multi-exposure of the maximum of a meteor swarm from a meadow next to the Colonial Observatory in eastern Slovakia in 2018, the processing of the image took almost two years.

Last time NASA in mid-July she published Horálek’s photograph The Long Tails of Comet Neowis, which captures the sky above Suchý vrch near Králík in the Orlické Ústí region.

“However, the film called ‘Perseids of Perseus’ has a very strong story – it was extremely difficult to process. It took more than 450 hours, but physically, due to many complications and other activities, it took almost two years to complete,” said the author.

The Perseid meteor shower is generally the most famous and popular annual cosmic performance among humans. Thanks to the long, more than a month’s activity from the middle of July to the third decade of August, everyone will really notice those “shooting stars” from Perseus on summer nights, says Horálek. So it occurred to him to take all the recorded meteors during at least a week and display them in a single image of the all-night mosaic, the mosaic of the sky from dusk to dawn.

He basically needed two things to come up with the idea – a completely dark sky and at least a week of clear weather and plenty of time to process. “The first condition was met during the maximum of the Perseida meteor shower in August 2018, when the Moon did not disturb at all and I had the opportunity to spend another photographic week on the grounds of the observatory in Kolonický sedlo in the Poloniny Dark Sky Park,” said the photographer.

According to him, it was significantly more problematic with free time for processing. “In the end, paradoxically, an unpleasant pandemic crisis that trapped us at home helped,” he said.

The image shows several days

The meteors in the mosaic are not captured during one night, but during the entire tour of the “perseid harvests”, specifically from 6 to 14 August 2018. A more detailed description of how the image was created is on the information server Czech Astronomical Society.

NASA’s Astronomical Image of the Day (APOD) is a prestigious award for the most interesting photograph of the universe, selected and supplemented by astronomers Jerry Bonnell and Robert Nemiroff for each day. APOD’s motto is “Discover the Universe” and since 1995, when the selection began, it has become one of the most recognized of its kind in the world. The accompanying texts are translated into 23 languages, including Czech, which has been taken care of since 1999 by Josef Chlachula. Hundreds of millions of visitors follow APOD on social networks every day.

During the 25-year history of APOD, several Czech authors have succeeded in the selection, most often scored by Horálek and Miloslav Druckmüller, whose film was last awarded by NASA in July. A complete list of Czech and Slovak achievements can be found on the website of the Czech Astronomical Society.

Video: See what Comet Neowise looks like above a storm cloud.

Comet Neowis above a storm cloud Video: Reuters

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