Sometimes the strangeness and beauty of nature come together in a scene so lovely, so surreal, that words fail. Such is the case in Phil Hart’s spectacular gallery of pictures showing bioluminescence in Gippsland Lakes in Victoria, Australia:
Oh, my. Can you believe this is real? I had to compress the file to get it to work on the blog, so please click it to see it in higher-resolution, and also look at the other astonishing pictures in his gallery.
Phil has a page describing in detail the pictures. In this case, a 1.5 hour exposure shows the glow from the trillions of Noctiluca Scintillans protists in the lake, as well as the trails of stars as they circle the southern celestial pole. That light on the horizon is not the Moon, but a house or some other man-made object. I love how the reflection curves and breaks up near the shore.
Phil’s pictures are simply breath-taking, and you just have to go and take a look. I am continually astonished at just how beautiful and surprising nature can be. It’s thrilling to see such disparate pieces superposed in this way.
Tip o’ the luciferin to Jared Hopkins. Image used with permission of Phil Hart.
March 3rd, 2011 at 7:05 am
Ooohhhh! Pretty!
March 3rd, 2011 at 7:09 am
very nice
March 3rd, 2011 at 7:38 am
“Paths that lead to the ordinary
are marked by the obvious lights;
In order to reach the EXTRAORDINARY,
You must pause, and find the path to the maw of the night.”
The glare of the light on the lake vs. the algae I saw as two paths – the glare leading to the house, but the algae leading directly to the axis of the stars rotation, which one could say even looks some kind of portal/classical sci-fi wormhole. Anyway, the poem is my take on this photo plus light pollution – you need to stop and stare a while to see the extraordinary!!
March 3rd, 2011 at 8:06 am
Hi, Phil
Just a small correction. This picture shows the glow of a Noctiluca scintillans bloom, a dinoflagellate that was thriving on the lake by feeding on the cyanobacterium Synechococcus.
March 3rd, 2011 at 8:07 am
A most excellent pic!
March 3rd, 2011 at 8:09 am
Wow that sure brings back memories, about 18 years ago I’ve seen this ‘live’ on the beach of one of the small islands off the north coast of the Netherlands. I remember being struck with awe seeing light comming from the breaking waves, it was as if a line of divers was illuminating the breaking waves from within the water. Luckily I was not alone at the time and two of my friends were there (being equally struck by the beauty of this phenomenon) because for a moment I thought I had lost my marbles
March 3rd, 2011 at 8:22 am
Beautiful, but as a microbiologist, I gotta fix this a bit. Syneccococcus is a cyanobacterium and not bioluminescent. Noctiluca scintillans, as you might guess from the name, makes the light. Noctiluca is a dinoflagellate that eats the cyanobacterium bloom.
March 3rd, 2011 at 8:38 am
The reflection of the light curving near the shore is proof that this photo is a NASA hoax, which was faked to prevent us from learning the TRUTH! This photo was obviously shot in a sound stage in Bakersfield, CA. Stars circling celestial poles? Round Earth? Unlikely! You look out at the horizon, and does it look round? No! It looks flat! The tides come in and go out, no miscommunication…you can’t explain that!
[/tinfoil hat]
March 3rd, 2011 at 8:57 am
D’oh! Sorry about the mixup; I wanted to make sure I got the spelling of the luminescent species correct, so I cut and pasted… the wrong name. I fixed it, thanks.
March 3rd, 2011 at 9:00 am
Any good explanation as to why the archs of the star paths seem to be oblong? I would have thought that they should be perfectly circular. Is this due to progression through earth’s orbit?
March 3rd, 2011 at 9:08 am
@10 The shot looks to be a fairly wide-angle shot. That is most likely caused by compression in the image from the lens used.
March 3rd, 2011 at 9:14 am
Read his explanation and saw the other photos. Cool. He ended:
If only I could order it all up again!
Camera technology + nature surprising us through a chain of events + him getting out there at the right time = very beautiful photos. Does he really want those floods again though?
March 3rd, 2011 at 9:28 am
A few years back I visited the Phosphorescent Bay in Parguera, Puerto Rico. We took the night tour into the bay. All lights were out, new moon, clear skies. I was at a loss, do I watch the water, or Crux and Centaurus overhead? Omega was an easy naked-eye target (and I had my 15×70 binos), but the water was amazing. That night will always by etched in my mind as one of the best I have ever had. These photos bring back the memory.
March 3rd, 2011 at 10:56 am
For anyone else confused by Phil’s comments and/or poor black differentiation on your screen:
The blue is the shoreline, not an unnaturally straight blue line down the middle of the lake. What appears to be the reflection of trees on the right hand side is actually, I think the line differentiating a ?sandy? beach from some grass/brush.
March 3rd, 2011 at 11:24 am
[...] Enlarge. | Via. [...]
March 3rd, 2011 at 1:24 pm
[...] Το άρθρο πρωτοείδα στο bad astronomy. [...]
March 3rd, 2011 at 3:46 pm
[...] The stars above, the luminescence below. [...]
March 3rd, 2011 at 4:11 pm
another quick correction to the name, Noctiluca scintillans – the specific epithet starts with a small ‘s’, not capital. Lovely pic mash-up of astronomy and aquatic ecology. Older rules of Latin grammar dictated that names of people and places were capitalised, but this has fallen by the wayside.
In this case, the specific epithet means ‘to sparkle’, which has some poetic symmetry between the water, the algae and stars..
March 3rd, 2011 at 5:14 pm
[...] [Phil Hart via Bad Astronomy] [...]
March 3rd, 2011 at 5:20 pm
[...] [Phil Hart via Bad Astronomy] [...]
March 3rd, 2011 at 5:59 pm
Wow! Love this photo – although my all-time favourite of his is his Southern Cross mosaic.
By marvellous co-incidence I saw & spoke with Phil Hart in person just a couple of days ago when he was the visiting guest speaker* at the South Australian Astronomical Society meeting. He gave a great talk which my Dad** and I both really enjoyed. This was among the photos he showed.
—————–
* The exchange talk with the Astronomical Society of Victoria.
** My Dad has retired and is now getting into photography. It’s only about the third or fourth Astro. Society meeting he’s been to.
March 3rd, 2011 at 8:57 pm
Why do the paths of the stars look elliptical rather than circular?
Pete
March 3rd, 2011 at 11:00 pm
Beautiful
Phil, would that happen to be a The Skies Above, The Field Below reference? (Explosions in the Sky would be a pretty good band for an astronomer!)
March 4th, 2011 at 5:30 am
Am i doing something wrong? When I click the link, the picture is no bigger, and I can’t seem to find a link to a higher quality version…
March 4th, 2011 at 7:20 am
I haven’t seen that phenomenon in over 20 years. I used to enjoy wading in the shallow water and stirring up the bugs. I collected great gobs of sand on a few occasions since I was determined to find the animal responsible – at the time I didn’t imagine the animals would be so small that they would not be easy to find by eye (if they are even visible to the eye except for the glow).
March 4th, 2011 at 11:26 am
What a spectacular photo. Thank you, Dr Plait.
March 5th, 2011 at 1:14 am
@Naomi: Woot, I love EITS – partly for that very reason. The name makes me think of super/novae
March 5th, 2011 at 2:09 pm
@Peter (#22): You can’t have a mapping from space to the plane which maps both straight lines to straight lines and all circles to circles. Usually one prefers the former (otherwise houses, horizons and trees would look silly), except for panorama shots or ultra-wide-angle lenses. This forces circles outside the center of the picture to be imaged as ellipses. The lens used in this case might have exacerbated it (the phenomenon gets stronger with wider angles), but not necessarily.
March 6th, 2011 at 4:25 am
[...] You will not see any photos today more awesome than this photo of night-time bioluminescence in the Gippsland Lakes. [...]
March 7th, 2011 at 4:22 pm
Not being facetious in the least, I find all of your comments , quite funny, and highly entertaining ! Education is interesting. The exactness and precision of definition reminds me a bit of the precision of Tool and Die. Yet, the tie between, beauty and perception of life and the universe expressed in an art form of understanding makes it all the more magnificent.
Thank you Phil
Carl