Stars in the Back Yard

I took this just last night from outside my back door. I lay on my back with my camera set up on the tripod right beside me, put on some nice quiet Beatles tunes and just generally chilled out for 20 or so minutes while the series of 41 photos were shot.

Then I smushed them in the magic smushing program, and here is the final product.

Short Trails around the North Pole

I took this last night from my back yard. I meant for the trails to be significantly longer, but my camera ran out of batteries. Still I think it is a very nice picture.

Tonight I plan on trying again to make longer trails. This one only has a combined exposure length of 7.5 minutes and I want to get an hour or so.

Once again, Polaris is in the photo, this time near the bottom right corner. I think that I will try pretty much the same photo tonight, and then on the weekend go out to some interesting locales to do the same sort of thing.

The First Flare Amongst Many a Trail

As I wrote a few posts ago, I have recently found a program that lets me take a sequence of photos and combine them to give me nice startrails. Since there have not really been any clear nights recently, I have been going back through my photos to try to find times when I took a bunch of pictures all in a row without moving the camera.

This is one of the results of that search.

Near the center of the frame is the first Iridium Flare I ever managed to take a photo of. Going across the bottom is an aircraft. If you look on the water at the very bottom, you can see red lines all nicely spaced out. Those are the reflections of the aircrafts beacon on the water as it flashed every second or so.

Up near the top left of the photo is Polaris. It is the only star in this photo which does not appear to be streaked.

In the middle of the photo you can actually see the big dipper as well. The tip of the handle is about as far above the aircraft lights as the lights are above the horizon, and it is pretty much directly under the left end of the flare. The cup of the dipper is pointing towards the flare and Polaris. The stars in the big dipper are some of the brighter stars in this photo.

Once the clouds go away I am going to try to get some really good long star trails. I think that it will be possible to find a night where I could catch multiple iridium flares as well as the ISS in the same sequence since all they need to do is pass through the same part of the sky. I can set my camera up to take a photo every few seconds, and let it do that for hours.

Round and Round the Merry-Go-Round

This kind of shot is very difficult to take in the city because of all the light. They almost always end up overexposed or really weird colors.

In this case, it is both overexposed and funny colors, but I like the effect. I also like the artifacts from the lens. The pink circle in the top left and the faint semicircles around it going towards the bottom right are from the streetlight that was just a little out of the frame.

These stars are all going around the north celestial pole. Polaris is in the center, the one star that is just a dot.

It is pretty neat how the ones in the center barely moved, but the ones at the edges moved a whole bunch. This is the same thing as on a merry go round. Standing in the center you are still, but as you move out you go faster and faster to get around in the same amount of time.

To take the photo, I set my camera up outside my door and pointed it up. I used the bulb exposure, and let it run for about 19 minutes. The ISO was 200 at f/5.6.

Iridium 37, Flare Near the Dipper

Finally! An Iridium Flare! I took this shot last night at just after 7 pm. You can see the big dipper in the picture, and if you follow the two stars at the end of the bucket you can see Polaris near the edge of the photo. The flare itself is the bright thing in the middle. 

I got to where I was going to shoot it about 10 minutes early and set up the camera. I knew that it was going to be 40 degrees in altitude about 25 degrees east of north. Having it so close to Polaris made it easy.

I did a few test photos to make sure everything was all lined up correctly. Then sat in the car to wait. The flare was to peak at about 10 seconds before 7:17, so I went back out at about 14 minutes after according to my cell.

My cell phone clock is about 2 minutes fast, and I know that, but when it hit 7:16 I saw a satellite coming from the right direction about to pass just out of the frame to the left. I almost moved the camera, and if I had I would have missed the real one. 

I saw the satellite around zenith, straight overhead. When came into where I knew the frame was I pressed the shutter button. I knew that if I just used a 30 second exposure it would get cut in half again, so I used a bulb exposure. The exposure ended up being just a tad under 70 seconds.

I quite like the result, and I think it is pretty cool how precisely these flare can be predicted. Anyways, that was my yesterday night.

Totem Poles and Golf Balls

This totem pole, one of the tallest in the world stands 127.5 feet tall. It seems to reach for the sky. It might even appear that it reaches for the stars.

If this is what it looks like, it does not even get anywhere close. It would take 995,873,684,210,526 of these totem poles lined up end to end to get to the nearest star.

In space distances are so huge that they are measured in light years. Light travels at 300,000 kilometers per second. It takes about 1 second to get to the moon, 8 minutes from the sun to the earth, and 5 hours 20 minutes to get from the sun to Pluto.

The nearest star, Alpha Proxima, is just under 4 light years from our sun. Our galaxy is around 80,000 light years across. The most distant object we can see with our eyes is 2,000,000 light years away, the Andromeda Galaxy. The most distant object we have detected is 13,200,000,000 light years away.

Space is a really big place.


In my mind, the largest relationship i can fathom is the earth and the moon. You can draw both the earth and the moon to scale on a piece of paper, and put them the right distance apart for that scale. I can fathom that. the relationship between our sun and the nearest star would be like taking a golf ball representing our sun, and then taking another golf ball, representing the nearest star. To put these at the right distance apart for their scale, the balls would need to be about 250km apart. And at that scale the earth is about the size of a grain of sand.

As I said before; Space is a really big place.

Enough about that. I took this photo at Beacon Hill park. Just behind the trees on the left is Polaris. The 2 minute exposure lets you see the motion of the stars start to form a circle.

Seattle and Satellite

There is something about star trails that I really like. They are hard to do though in Victoria because of the light pollution. This particular photo was taken from Clover Point, looking straight towards Seattle. The shutter was open for just under 12 minutes at f/3.5 and ISO 800.

I was trying to capture a satellite pass. I think I actually got two. The first is easy to see. It rises out of the light of Seattle and goes to about halfway up the left side of the picture.

The second is much more faint. You can only see it if you zoom way in. It is above the brighter one, and at the Seattle end it curves down into the bright patch.

I tried several times that night to get satellites, as I knew there were a bunch of them coming out of the south at around 6:00 when I was there. I saw a few of them with my eyes, but they were too faint to show up in the picture.

There are several ways you can find out where and when satellites you can see will go overhead. The website http://www.heavens-above.com/ is a great way to find out where and when all the neat satellites are going overhead. You just need to enter in your location at the top of the page, and then follow all the links to find out about all sorts of things.

A more visual way to do it is with the program Stellarium. It is a really awesome planetarium program that shows you the sky from wherever you are on earth, or on any other planet for that matter. It is a free download available here http://www.stellarium.org/ It is not only good for satellites, it is good for anything in the night sky. You can customize all sorts of options, go back and forth through the centuries and even control the light pollution at your selected location.

In the photo you can see the star trails curving. At the top they appear to curve one way, while at the bottom they curve the opposite way, and in the center, they go straight. This is because of where I pointed the camera. at the celestial equator, the stars seem to track a straight line through the sky. The celestial equator runs right through this picture from the left to the right, starting at about the top of the clouds. The stars above seem to rotate counterclockwise around Polaris, whereas the stars below move clockwise. It creates a neat effect.

The End of a Handle

Polaris, the north star. Although the exposure was not long enough to see any long streaks, you can see that all of the stars seem to be going around in a bit of a circle. The star in the very center of that circle is Polaris. Currently, it is located about one degree from the celestial north pole, near enough that we don't notice it is not perfect. It is also the end of the handle of the little dipper. You can find Polaris by drawing a line straight up from the two stars at the end of the Big Dippers dipper. It is the next bright star.

I am going to have a go at explaining how the celestial sphere works, and how it lets us pinpoint objects in the sky. Basically it works just like a globe, except that instead of it being something you look at from the outside, we look at it from the middle. To find the celestial poles we simply take the north pole of the earth, and drag a line straight up from it. We do the same with the south pole. The equator we simply keep making a larger and larger circle. Picture a globe with a rod through its poles so it rotates. If you were to take a much larger sphere and put the globe into it, then attach the rod to the larger sphere, that would be the celestial sphere. We are on the inside looking out.

The most common way of describing an objects location on earth is using latitude and longitude. The two are somewhat different in what they are based upon. Latitude is based upon the equator. 0 degrees latitude is exactly half way between the poles of the earth, and 90 degrees is the poles themselves. Longitude is largely an arbitrary measurement. It is now standardized that the prime meridian runs through Greenwich in London, but in the past when navigation was being developed, each country had its own 0 point.

The equatorial coordinate system of the celestial sphere works the same way, although they use different names. Declination is like latitude. Exactly half way between the celestial poles, directly above earths equator lies the celestial equator. From the equator you can go + or - 90 degrees declination. Like on earth, the poles are at + and -90 degrees declination.

Right Ascension is the astronomical name for Longitude. Like longitude on earth, it is measured from a somewhat arbitrary point. Unlike on earth however, the units are not degrees but hours, minutes and seconds. Also unlike longitude, it is measured in only one direction, starting at 0 and going east all the way around to 24. The use of hours is not all that different from the use of degrees, each hour the earth rotates 15 degrees, so that over the course of a full day 360 degrees of rotation and 24 hours have passed. The 0 point for right ascension is the position of the sun in the sky at the exact point of the vernal equinox. This is the point at which it crosses the celestial equator.

This system lets astronomers pinpoint any object in the night sky at any given time, and lets them find it again with no effort at all.

Back to the photo. I took this a few nights ago from the top of Mt Douglas. It is a very nice walk up there. The city is just stunning from up there at night. The exposure is a bit of a strange one. It is actually six individual 30 second exposures all on top of each other. My camera lets me take them and it smushes them all together. If you look really closely at the stars, particularly the ones near the top and bottom, you can actually see the individual exposures, and little blank spots between them where the shutter was not open. I kind of like the effect. The pinky color is from the city lights of Victoria.