Happy Trails! :-)

I’ve FINALLY figured out how to get my Nikon B700 to take star trails for me – YAYYY! 😀

Last night the weather gods co-operated also and i was able to capture my first ever Southern sky star trail photograph, which if i say so myself, is rather good! 😉

(Click on pics to open in a new window with full enlarged detail You get a much improved image) 🙂
The shadow in the bottom right of photo is my neighbour’s sunshade over his pool with a brown pole holding the corner up.

The bright star trail at the top of the pic is the star Canopus (Alpha Carinae), the second brightest star as seen from Earth after Sirius. The two bright trails close to each other bottom left are Alpha (bottom) and Beta (top) Centauri. Those two ‘point’ to the constellation well-known to all Aussies, the Southern Cross, which are the three next brightest trails plus a fainter one starting between the one on the left and the centre of the three.

Unlike Northern star trails that have Polaris as a roughly central pivot point for their rotation, down under the sky is largely dark at the exact pole which is located due South and at an angle of around 31 degrees to the horizon from me and is just above where the shadecloth comes into the photo above.

This picture shows the rotational movement in the sky of the Southern stars over a roughly 90 minute period or about 1/16th of their daily rotation (around 22 degrees of Arc).

My camera has a really cool way of generating this image! It takes a 25 second exposure, followed by another, then another and so on for 30 captures and adds the brightest points of light from the initial image to the points in the following image to make a new one until a total of 30 images have been merged into a single image file. It will do this until you stop the process or it has taken 150 minutes worth of exposures. It saves each 30 exposures as a new file image name and you can compare how each image grows into the next.

Here are two of the 7 images taken making up the larger final one above.

 

In the full-sized screenshots you can see the ‘outer’ stars showing as multiple single images for the 30, 60 and 90 minute shots, rather than the merged ‘lines’ of each star’s trail closer to the Pole where the relative movement across the sky is less.

Any Flat Earth proponents who’d care to try and explain why ‘my’ stars don’t rotate around ‘your’ North Pole are welcome to offer their opinion in the comments below.

 

love