AIR day 15 - item 1 (star trails)

The following is a blog post from the Astronomer-In-Residence (AIR) web site, reproduced here. Text and images used with permission.

Day 15 blog entry.

Monday 23 May 2022: The Sky Turns

Imaged the sky turning. Rather, the Earth turning below the sky! In a moonless sky.

Captured Sunday night or technically early Monday morning.

Canon 40D, Rokinon 8mm fisheye at f/5.6, ISO 1600, daylight white balance, 35 second exposures, 5 second gap, 202 shots captured with Neewer intervalometer, from 1:00 AM to 3:00 AM. Converted from RAW to TIFF with Photoshop. Combined with StarStaX, gap-fill mode.

Those are true star colours. Lyra with white Vega in the middle. Scorpius and orange Antares at the right.

Note the meteor down in the trees. How many little sporadic meteors can you see?

There’s a “tumbler” satellite at the top-left. Or a plane?

Forgot, again, to shoot darks! Sorry for the hot pixels.

Click the thumbnail image in the gallery for a full-size version and dive in…

You know you’re in a dark park when the trees go black.

The Astronomer-In-Residence program is coordinated by the Allan I Carswell Observatory (AICO) at York University with the Killarney Provincial Park Observatory (KPPO).