Late last night I noticed that there wasn’t much cloud cover and decided to stare up at the stars for a minute or two while waiting for my laptop to finish burning a DVD.
I easily recognised Ursa Major (or ‘the Great Bear’, or ‘the Big Dipper’, or ‘the Plough’) and Polaris (the North star), but there was a bright star to the west, quite high in inclination that I didn’t recognise. I loaded up an astronomy program in order to figure out what it was and it turned out to be a star called Vega. I then got some binoculars out to look at it and I found that I could see lots of other stars that I couldn’t view with the naked eye. While I knew this happened, I was still quite amazed how dramatic the effect was, and how beautiful. I thought I’d try and use my camera to take some pictures – using an exposure of 30 seconds at ISO 200 brought out some detail but I think I’ll need to increase the ISO or use my remote shutter control to manually increase the exposure time. I will try both and see what happens.
The astronomy programs that I used are both free (open source) and are Stellarium and Celestia.