Astronomy now has a new star on the horizon

Alex Cherney and his daughter Milana, who inspired him A daughter's kindergarten project on the solar system inspired Alex Cherney to take up astronomy. That led to an interest in astro-photography, and early this morning Sydney time at Starmus - an elite-level new astronomy and arts festival in the Canary Islands - he was presented as the winner of the festival's photographic competition.
He beat more than 250 global entrants, and part of the prize was a paid trip to the festival.
Three judges including Australian astro-photographer David Malin, said Cherney had captured ''a beautiful collection of time-lapse sequences of the southern Milky Way seen over the Southern Ocean''.
The citation says: ''The scenes are chosen with the eye of an artist, but the subtle panning and excellent control of colour and contrast reveal technical skills of a high order.
''Especially beautiful are the halos of colour around of the stars in the Southern Cross, when seen through thin cloud.''
Mr Cherney, a Melbourne IT consultant who was born in Ukraine and turned 36 yesterday, said when he learned he had won the prize last month, ''first I was really excited then I thought maybe it's a prank''.
Almost a bigger thrill, however, has been having his picture taken with festival guests including US astronauts Edwin ''Buzz'' Aldrin and Neil Armstrong and Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov.
Cherney also chatted to rock band Queen's guitarist Brian May, a qualified astrophysicist who is playing in the festival's concert tomorrow and who yesterday gave a paper What Are We Doing in the Universe?
Capping it all, Cherney has also won an hour's use of the world's largest optical telescope, the GTC (GRANTECAN or Gran Telescopio Canarias) on the island of La Palma. ''It's like the wildest dream come true,'' says Cherney. And it's all thanks to his daughter, Milana, now eight.
''I didn't bother to look into the sky when I was growing up in Ukraine,'' he said. ''But four years ago Milana came back from kinder and they had a program about space and she asked if I could help her find aliens. We joined the Mornington Peninsula astronomical society, and the first time I looked through a telescope was amazing. The first object was Saturn and a few deep space objects like the Great Orion nebula.''
In 2009, an amateur astronomer friend introduced Cherney to long-exposure photography and he was hooked. ''You capture it so it's always there,'' he said. ''You can study it later in detail and it looks very beautiful.''
The lens actually captures more than the eye. ''With the naked eye during the night, we don't see colour in the Milky Way, or in the nebula; they're all [almost] black and white, but in the photographs you see colour. The real colour that's there,'' he said.
For the Starmus competition he shot at 25 frames a second over six nights from cliffs at Cape Schanck, Flinders and the Great Ocean Road, then edited the footage to 2 and a half minutes.