It's the rarest of nights on Wajarri Yamaji Country, about 800 kilometres north of Perth.
There's no hint of the Moon. Not a wisp of cloud. The Milky Way is rising, heavy with shimmering stars. But what truly sets tonight apart from all the others is that CSIRO's ASKAP radio telescope is not scanning the sky.
It gives acclaimed Australian astrophotographer Alex Cherney an opportunity given to a rare few. Photography is normally not permitted here because the telescopes are so sensitive, the electronic noise will interfere with the observations.
"I was basically alone walking around the dishes," says Alex.
"You can actually see your own shadow, just from the light of the Milky Way.
"I get goosebumps. It's difficult to describe in human language, but it's a feeling that disconnects you from the day-to-day problems and makes you think about what's out there. We are just a small camera capturing photons on a speck of dust floating somewhere in the universe."
What he captures through his camera lens will be used to showcase a mystery of the Universe that can't be seen with our eyes.
It's about 9pm and the Milky Way is vertical. Alex contacts the site manager for another rare occurrence at the site - asking an advanced radio telescope to move on his whim.
He has the dishes pointed exactly the direction he wants them to compose his photograph.
"If you ask me what's your favourite place to photograph and to do the night sky photography, I would say this observatory, without hesitation," says Alex of Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory.
"It's addictive. The darkness of the skies and the antennas, surreal landscape. And I've never seen the sky as dark anywhere else. Maybe at the Atacama Desert in Chile - but that's a long way away."
Shooting the panorama
Alex is there all night - from sunset to just before sunrise.
In his first photo, the Milky Way is vertical. It's not until much later, as it starts to set that it is in the perfect position.
He knows, instinctively, that this is the moment.
Alex's camera is specially modified for astro-photography. Unlike most cameras, it doesn't cut out ultraviolet and infrared light or the deep red colour from hydrogen clouds found in the core of the Milky Way, that are not visible to our eyes.
He uses a diffusion filter, which helps present brighter stars as bigger, to portray the night sky as closer to our experience of it.
Alex takes a series of 10 photographs, each with a 30 second exposure - long enough to catch the light, but short enough that the stars don't 'streak' across the sky.
Later, he will stitch the 10 images together to build the final panoramic photograph.
Alex Cherney's panorama image was taken with a Canon 6D, modified for astrophotography with a hydrogen-alpha low pass filter, stitched in PTGUI and processed in Adobe Photoshop. (Focal length:15mm; Aperture: f/2.8; ISO: 3200; Shutter speed: 30s).
"When you see that it turns out the way you want, it brings back the emotion I felt when I was taking the photo," smiles Alex.
Same sky, different view
With the ASKAP radio telescope, researcher Dr Alec Thomson observes the same sky in a completely different way.
He's leading an international team including researchers from CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, and the SKA Observatory (SKAO), an intergovernmental organisation building two of the world's largest radio telescopes. Data on four million distant galaxies was collected by ASKAP, with the team using 350,000 of those to build a magnetic map of our Universe. They could do this by tracking how a galaxy's light twists as it passes through each magnetic field.
CSIRO's team of ASKAP operators and scientists regularly use the telescope to scan the sky for the Universe's radio signals, building the Rapid ASKAP Continuum Surveys (RACS). These surveys collect all sorts of data for the world's astronomers, such as the arrangement of galaxies throughout the Universe, how galaxies are moving, how quickly stars are rotating, the size of black holes, and even magnetic fields of nearby stars and faraway galaxies.
Taking the RACS data and sifting out just the information on magnetic fields, the result is the most detailed magnetic map of the Universe ever produced - five times larger than all previous efforts combined. They call this new map SPICE-RACS, standing for Spectra and Polarisation in Cutouts of Extragalactic sources from RACS.
What does SPICE-RACS tell us?
Dr Thomson says the scale of this map helps us better understand the way energy moves through the Universe.
"For the first time we can investigate fine details of the material between nearby stars, and study a huge number of distant galaxies," Dr Thomson adds.
"This could help us understand how galaxies develop and evolve. Not just distant galaxies, but our own galaxy too.
"The data is freely available on the CSIRO data portal, so any scientist around the world can use it to help shape their own research. It literally opens up a world of scientific opportunity."
Though the data exists as a catalogue of measurements, Alec was also able to generate a visual map in red and blue to signal the magnetic field directions. Red shows where the field is pointing towards the Earth (like the north pole of a magnet) and the blue pointing away.
Visualising the data
Enter digital artist Sam Moorfield, who works in special effects and has a focus on space. He has spent years alongside astronomers helping us picture the impossible.
Sam worked with Alex to carefully overlay the SPICE-RACS map over his photographic panorama. It wasn't a simple process.
"I'm always more engaged with scientific visualisation when I hold back from inventing details," said Sam.
"For the SPICE-RACS project, I was lucky enough to have a seamless 360-degree panorama of the ASKAP radio telescope taken by Alex and his colleague Tom Fowler.
"Dr Alec Thomson's magnetic map included bold, contrasting colours for visual impact. But most importantly it included galactic coordinates, like the Magellanic Clouds and the plane of the Milky Way, so I was able to align the images perfectly.
"Accuracy is everything. This is incredibly detailed scientific data that takes a lot of time, skill and knowledge to interpret. There's no such thing as 'near enough is good enough' when combining these images."
Sam then added the artistic flair to make it blend more seamlessly: a subtle glow at the horizon, detailed etching around ASKAP's dishes and careful placement of the map to ensure it sat correctly behind each tree and telescope.
"The SPICE-RACS visualisation project has been a collaboration between research, photography and graphic art. I couldn't be happier with the result."
"We've connected two worlds in a stunning, scientifically accurate image that capture imagination for people without an astronomy background."
And from the photographer, who caught the original Milky Way image?
"A lot of work went into producing that magnetic map," says Alex.
"To see it superimposed on my photo makes me feel a small part of it. I'm humbled."
A team effort to reveal the invisible and make the impossible possible.
