Astrophotography First

With only a 25cm telescope, amateur New Zealand astronomer Rolf Olsen has for the first time been able to get a direct photograph of the disk of swirling material forming a planet around a nearby star. Discover Magazine’s Phil Plait, who calls the discovery an “amateur milestone”, explains: “Beta Pictoris is a young star just over 60 light years away. The light from the star itself has been subtracted away, and the two big crosshair streaks of light are called diffraction spikes – they’re caused by light inside the telescope and aren’t real. The fuzz you see above and below the star is real, part of the disk of material forming planets right before our eyes. The dashed line was added by Olsen to show the orientation of the disk.” Olsen wrote on his website: “I must say it feels really special to have actually captured this.” Olsen’s observatory is located in Titirangi in the foothills of the Waitakere Ranges west of Auckland.