I photographed this from my backyard here in Brakpan - in the middle of the city. I use multiple different filters like hydrogen alpha, sulphur two and oxygen three. Those filters only allow a narrow spectrum of light through of 6 nanometers. That basically blocks out all the light pollution that one gets in the city, so you can get high-quality pictures from town.’
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Quagga were all wiped out by pioneer hunters in Southern Africa during the 19th century. They were a subspecies of Zebra basically similar in appearance, with wider stripes that disappear towards the back of their bodies. In 1987 a programme started to try and resurrect the Quagga using selective breeding. Those found on the grounds of the iThemba Lab (the largest facility of Africa for particle and nuclear research) is part of this ongoing programme.
ZEBRAS AND THE OLD VAN DE GRAAF ACCELERATOR, ITHEMBA LABS, CAPE TOWN
Quagga were all wiped out by pioneer hunters in South Africa in the 19th century. They were a subspecies of Zebra basically with a similar appearance, but their stripes become wider and disappear towards the back where it is also more of a brown colour. In 1987 a programme started to try and resurrect the Quagga using selective breeding. The only known photograph of a living one was taken by F.York at a London zoo in 1870.
The Zebra found on the grounds of the iThemba Lab (the largest facility of Africa for particle and nuclear research) is part of an ongoing programme to reintroduce the Quagga.
Read MoreSCATTERING CHAMBER AND TARGET LADDER, ITHEMBA LABS, CAPE TOWN
‘This is where the interaction between the charged particles of the beam and the target nuclei take place. From the analysis of the reaction products it is possible to understand nuclear structure properties and interaction principles.’
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'In other words, it's a place where we try to reproduce stars in a laboratory - stars are the place where there is a high density of protons, neutrons and from this high density, there are collisions that are going to create heavier elements. So this is what we are trying to do now, we are trying to reproduce what happens in stars, in the laboratory.'
Dr. Faïçal Azaiez, Director at iThemba LABS, Laboratory for Accelerator-Based Sciences.
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THEO FERREIRA, PLANETARIUM MANAGER, CAPE TOWN
‘What makes this system so powerful is that you can leave the earth - you are not stuck on the earth anymore. Traditional planetarium shows are stuck on the earth looking up at the night sky, now we can fly away from the earth and travel through the universe, moving out into space - right back to the beginning. We don’t actually have data sets that go that far back, but be can get really close, looking at some of the galaxies billions of light years away from us and, of course, when you are looking at those galaxies you are looking back in time - into the past. This is strange because we are looking at objects develop, seeing them as they were a very long time ago.’
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