All images by Adam Jesionkiewicz. Used with Creative Commons permission.
If you think astrophotography is all about photographing the star trails and the Milky Way at night, you’re definitely mistaken. One look at the breathtaking photos snapped by Warsaw-based Adam Jesionkiewicz will tell you that this highly specialized type of photography is capable of creating images literally out of this world.
When he’s not working in the field of graphic design, Adam spends his time looking up to the night sky as an astrophotographer. And by that, I don’t mean simply peering through a camera pointed up to a clear sky to capture the stars and the Milky Way like how we typically see them. Essentially, he extends his reach all the way out into the vast cosmos with the help of specialized cameras and telescopes to take images of nebulas and other celestial objects.
A fine example of the heavenly bodies he photographs is this collection called Cygnus the Swan. It’s named after one the most recognizable constellations of the northern hemisphere, spotted during the summer and autumn months. As the title suggests, these are photos of some deep-sky objects that can be found within the constellation of Cygnus: The Wall, sometimes called the North America Nebula and the Cygnus Wall, the Pelican Nebula, and the Butterfly Nebula.
Astrophotography is actually considered as a significant sub-discipline of amateur astronomy, pioneered during the mid-19th century. Whenever I see the works of passionate astrophotographers like Adam, I am reminded of how far we’ve gone with imaging technology, to the point that we can now take pictures of the far reaches of space. The beautiful colors we see in nebula photos like the ones in Adam’s Cygnus collection are often false color images, with colors representing either a wavelength of light, a structural detail, or the NASA Hubble-palette.
If you’re a fan of space images, it would be worth checking Adam Jesionkiewicz’s Behance portfolio for his other astrophotography projects.
