August 13, 2010

For photographers, and a welcome

Welcome to the blog Bill!  Thanks for the awesome first post, although we will never speak of astrology again thank you!!!

In other news, Bill put me onto an awesome website today for calculating how long an exposure you can use before you start to get star trails .. this is awesome for photographers to know, so I decided to post some of the more common southerb stars here, with their declinations, for my not-so-astronomical friends who look at me funny when I say "declination."  Declination is of course how far a star is from the celestial equator :)

So go here: http://www.galacticfool.com/calculate-star-trails/

and here are the stars!!!


Southern Cross
Acrux -63.1575
Gacrux -57.1717

Orion
Anilam (middle star of the belt) -1.1958
Betelgeuse 7.4083

Aldebaran 16.5303
Canopus -52.7019
Sirius -16.7286
Formalhault -29.5656
Archenar -57.1831
Antares -26.4547
Vega 38.7936

these are all pulled from Stellarium, which you can get from http://www.stellarium.org/

And lastly, how to find the south pole:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_pole#Finding_the_south_celestial_pole

The reason I'm working around to this is of course my latest few shots, which feature quite rich and not-too-streaky star fields.  This prompted some questions from fellow photo-bunnies, and well here it is :)  Weather looks like poo for the next week or so, which is a pity as there is a beautiful clustering of the moon and several planets tonight ... damn you clouds!

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