My wife recently gave me a great little camera and I’m having lots of fun using the night sky setting! (I also used to for underwater shots that you can see in my post about octopuses.)
A three-hour exposure is a wonderful way of seeing how much is going on above our heads as we spin around on Earth. Below are some shots I took this summer in the south of France. At this latitude and altitude (44 degrees north, 50m above sea level) I was spinning at about 1250km/h as the Earth rotates. I was also on a planet orbiting the Sun at roughly 107,000 km/h. That sun is in a solar system rotating around the Milky Way galaxy at approximately 700,000 km/h. And as the universe expends, our galaxy is moving 2.2 million km/h relative to the cosmic background radiation that permeates the universe. (Source)
With all that going on, it’s a wonder that the surface of water in a glass can look still.
Back to the stars! Below the northern Pole Star is right at the bottom & centre of the shot, turning in a very small circle, almost motionless. We see it this way because the Earth’s axis point almost exactly at it. Just above it there’s a small meteor.
In this next shot the streak on the right is probably a satellite as it’s white, compared to the smaller meteor on the lower left by the tree.
Here some whisps of cloud give a nice effect. We can also see the red and green dotted trail of a plane at high altitude.
The different colours that we see depend on the nature of light each star emits as well as the atmospheric conditions. Cooler stars have redder wavelengths, and at the other end of the scale hotter objects have bluer wavelengths. Yellow and green are between the two extremes.
The next shot is in the same location, but looking in exactly the opposite direction, towards the south. The trails are gentle curves, upwards in the top part of the photo, downwards at the bottom and almost straight lines between the two. And there are quite a number of planes as this is not looking towards the air corridors above Marseilles. There’s also the characteristic thin while line of a satellite.
And here we can see how much busier the sky is in Brussels, Belgium! As well as all the planes, there’s a small meteor ‘fireball’ on the left and a couple of satellites.
In case you’re interested, the camera is an Olympus Tough TG-6. It has a 12 megapixel sensor, 4X optical zoom lens, 25-100mm equivalent F2.0-4.9 stabilised lens. The specs say it is water proof to 15m, shock proof from 2m, crush proof to 100kgf, freeze proof to -10°C and dust proof. It fits into your pocket and so can accompany you on almost any adventure.
