It's strange, but only a couple of days after thinking that I'd like to try some astro-photography I got the perfect night for it - cloudless, windless and mild. So I ventured out at one o'clock this morning and found a clearing in the forest to set up my tripod. It's slightly unsettling being in the forest in pitch darkness but to look up and see the stars so clearly is genuinely awe-inspiring.
I just wish I knew a bit more about the night sky. The cloudy vertical band in the image above is the Milky Way, but that's about all I can tell you. Identifying constellations amid such a busy sky is difficult and I wasn't sure if any planets were in view. Can anyone help?
What, for example, is the cloudy star circled in red above? It looks like a supernova but I'd be surprised if such a thing was visible to the naked eye. And the dense cluster circled in green must be easily identifiable, but not by me. The top photograph was taken facing north west, the second facing west.
I took some other shots where I popped a flashgun during the exposure to show some detail in the trees. They didn't really work but it occurred to me that a distant observer might interpret strange flashes in the forest as something other-worldly, especially round here.
Light pollution is the biggest problem. It may have seemed pitch black to me, but I was still only a couple of miles from a load of street lamps. If you can get far enough away from populated areas then it's possible to capture images like this. The only places you could get close to that in the UK are parts of Wales and Scotland, but it's usually cloudy there.
Anyway, there are a couple more images on my Flickr page if you're interested.
6 comments:
I keep a skymap app on my phone for just this sort of question, and I think if it was a later model with a compass in then I could pretty well just point it at any object in the sky and it would tell me what I was looking at. I'd love that but not enough to upgrade my phone for.
I've posted a ridiculously long url of the Pleiades, which if you tilt slightly appears to match your photo:
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.daviddarling.info/images/Pleiades_labeled.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/P/Pleiades.html&h=330&w=410&sz=46&tbnid=74SP6Akc0Y65_M:&tbnh=101&tbnw=125&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dpleiades&zoom=1&q=pleiades&hl=en&usg=__fvw8qX2NNJbDTrscO0MXXn9ALcc=&sa=X&ei=5AiyTI2iOZ-Q4gbx0pTxBQ&ved=0CDgQ9QEwBQ
This is an easier wiki link to the green circle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades_(star_cluster)
Otherwise known as the Seven Sisters.
I should point out that my knowledge of astronomy is minimal, and googling pleiades was merely a lucky guess. I'm afraid I can't help with the red circle.
Btw, very nice photos, Graham!
I think it MIGHT be the Andromeda Nebulus, but I'm not an expert!
Hmmm, plugging the dates and direction into Stellarium and I'd guess red is Vega or Deneb, but I'm a bit baffled by green. The M2 or M15 globular clusters are in the right area, but they're too dim to be so obvious in this shot...
Better watch it with the flash near Rendelsham Forest - you never know what you'll start.
Thanks for the suggestions. I feel semi-enlightened and at least I wasn't missing anything embarrassingly obvious.
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