More stargazing photos from our January 5 trip to Tuckahoe State Park: southern horizon to zenith
This post contains some more information about our road-trip, and a series of cell phone photos that swept the sky from the southern horizon to the zenith.
Last week, I posted about our steemstargazing road-trip last Saturday (January 5) to Tuckahoe State Park in Queen Anne, Maryland in Planning ideas for dark-sky astronomy road trips and Photography: Car and Stars.
According to lightpollutionmap.info, Tuckahoe is a Bortle class 4 site with zenith brightness of 0.328 mcd/m2 and radiance of 0.41 * 109 W / cm2 * sr. I'm not sure exactly how to interpret all that, but basically it's darker than our home skies, but brighter than a really dark site like Cherry Springs State Park in Pennsylvania. In particular, light pollution from Annapolis, Baltimore, and Washington DC is clearly visible in the western sky. One of these days, I'll have to learn what the numbers mean and do a post on it.
In this post, I have some more photos from our trip. I took these photos with @cmp2020's cell phone while he was busy using my cell phone to get a minute by minute sequence of photos centered on the north star. For this series of photos, I began on the southern horizon and moved up to the zenith, one photo at a time.
If you'd like to compare the stars to a constellation map, you can use the Online Planetarium. Set the location to Annapolis, Maryland and the date to January 5, 2019. Photo time stamps are listed, so that you can see where they fit in the overall sky map.
The Quadrantids meteor shower was visible that night, but I don't think we got any in our photos. As a general rule, when a streak shows up in a multi-second photograph, a dotted line (like those in the first two photos) seems to imply an airplane with its blinking lights. Meteors seem to appear as solid lines.
click on photo for larger view.
Southern Horizon with Canis Major (including Sirius) visible in left half of frame (22:30)
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Slightly higher in southern sky.
Canis Major still in view, along with Orion's knees, belt, and sword. (22:38)
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Slightly higher again.
Orion's shoulders now in view. (22:40)
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Still higher. Orion in bottom of frame, Taurus on the right.(22:43)
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Slightly above Orion, we find Gemini, Auriga, and Taurus (22:45).
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Now at the zenith, we still see Taurus' horns, Auriga, and Gemini (22:46)
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This was slightly past the zenith, and on towards Perseus, but I don't think it includes any new constellations. (22:49)
Conclusion
This was the third in my serious of posts on the steemstargazing road-trip to Tuckahoe State Park, in Queen Anne, MD. It contained a photographic sequence from the southern horizon to the zenith. I still have enough photos left for some more posts, so check back soon.
Rewards from this post will be shared with the steemstargazing team members who were present for the outing: @astronomyizfun, @cmac, @cmp2020, and @remlaps.
Thank you for your time and attention.
Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.
Steve is a co-founder of the Steemit's Best Classical Music Facebook page, and the @classical-music steemit curation account.
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Hello @remlaps, thank you for sharing this creative work! We just stopped by to say that you've been upvoted by the @creativecrypto magazine. The Creative Crypto is all about art on the blockchain and learning from creatives like you. Looking forward to crossing paths again soon. Steem on!