I love doing star trails around the south celestial pole (SCP) as they show that our Earth is rotating on its axis, they also show where you’ve taken the image on Earth by showing where the north or south celestial pole is positioned in the night sky.
This image was taken at a small country town called Bendemeer in NSW Australia, and its latitude was 30 degrees south of the equator, so the SCP was 30 degrees up from my southern horizon (if you live in the northern hemisphere you would be looking to the northern sky to find your NCP) :-)
The two fuzzy patches near the top of the image are the Large and Small Magellanic clouds, which are small companion galaxies to our Milky Way galaxy; they are circumpolar here in Australia so we always have them in the sky sometime during the night.
Above is an image of a 1-hour long single exposure, plus another in camera 1-hour dark frame exposure for noise reduction (2 hours) using a Canon 700D camera and a Canon 18-55mm lens set at 18mm and f3.5,
the ISO was 200.
The slideshow below is the same view as the Startrail plus a short exposure image of 75 seconds to show the star groups in the night sky, you can also see how far the sky has rotated in 1hour around the SCP. The LMC and SMC galaxies were prominent, along with some of the faint constellations of the southern sky called Mensa, Octans,
Apus and Chamaeleon.
The images were taken on our caravan trip stop over at Bendemeer in NSW on the evening of the 21st November 2017 with a small crescent-waxing Moon in the sky.
This image was taken at a small country town called Bendemeer in NSW Australia, and its latitude was 30 degrees south of the equator, so the SCP was 30 degrees up from my southern horizon (if you live in the northern hemisphere you would be looking to the northern sky to find your NCP) :-)
The two fuzzy patches near the top of the image are the Large and Small Magellanic clouds, which are small companion galaxies to our Milky Way galaxy; they are circumpolar here in Australia so we always have them in the sky sometime during the night.
Above is an image of a 1-hour long single exposure, plus another in camera 1-hour dark frame exposure for noise reduction (2 hours) using a Canon 700D camera and a Canon 18-55mm lens set at 18mm and f3.5,
the ISO was 200.
The slideshow below is the same view as the Startrail plus a short exposure image of 75 seconds to show the star groups in the night sky, you can also see how far the sky has rotated in 1hour around the SCP. The LMC and SMC galaxies were prominent, along with some of the faint constellations of the southern sky called Mensa, Octans,
Apus and Chamaeleon.
The images were taken on our caravan trip stop over at Bendemeer in NSW on the evening of the 21st November 2017 with a small crescent-waxing Moon in the sky.
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