Astronomer captures first amateur image of another solar system from his back yard

Astronomer captures first amateur image of another solar system from his back yard

An astronomer has captured the first amateur pictures of another solar system from a tiny telescope in his back yard.

Rolf Olsen, a New Zealand based astrophotographer, has published the first non-professional pictures of the disk of debris and dust swirling around Beta Pictoris, a very young solar system .

Incredibly, the 12 million-year-old system, some 60 million light years away from our own, was captured with only a 25cm telescope.

The material that forms the proto-planetary disc around Beta Pictoris has been photographed by large observatories often before, but it was not thought possible for amateurs to take a picture of the system, because of the glare from the star itself.

But by capturing an image of a similar star and subtracting it from the picture of Beta Pictoris, Olsen was able to eliminate the stellar glare, revealing the dust disk..

Olsen says he got the idea by reading a 1993 Harvard paper titled 'Observation of the central part of the beta Pictoris disk with an anti-blooming CCD'. Read More