Fun Without a Telescope

On the night of April 5, 2020, I decided to go out with just the DSLR camera to see if I could photograph Venus and the Pleiades again. Venus had moved further up in the sky and away from the Pleiades somewhat, but still within easy reach of my old Canon Xsi camera. So, I thought, why not?

Venus and Pleiades

I seemed to have gotten the focus a little better on this one, which pleases me. Still difficult to do, but I seemed to have gotten it pretty well. I found that using live view gets pretty close, but taking the image, and then zooming in as far as possible was the best way to get a good focus. It just takes longer to do. It's interesting that a 5 second image still shows some star trailing. I need to recompute the exposure time (I have the formula somewhere) to see what the exposure time should be to eliminate the star trails.

After a few shots in that part of the sky, I moved over to Orion and got a shot of the sword. It's OK, but nothing great. Then, since the moon was nearly full, I went over to it. Just by looking at it, I could see a yellow cast to it, so I assumed the high cloudiness was still around. I decided to see if I could show that, so I took a series of shots, some at a short exposure to see how well I could get the surface of the moon, and some at somewhat longer exposure times, to see if I could show (or detect, as it were) the high clouds. I think I did both, plus I got something extra, and I don't know what it is. First, the surface on the moon.

Moon, but I think you know that

The exposure here was quite short (for me, at least), only about 1/800 of a second. I've stretched this to make it lighter and show up better, but other than that, it's pretty much as it came off the camera.

"Smeared" light around moon. Not really a halo. Plus??

This one shows, by overexposure of the image, the high cloudiness. At least I think it does. Any overexposure will make the image too light, but this has the “smeared” look that I think indicates the cloudiness. In essence, the smearing comes from the clouds being lite up by the moonlight and glowing, as it were. Hopefully, you noticed the streak on the left side on the photograph. Closer up, it looks like this:

The "whatsit". Remember, this is a 1 second exposure, and it's moving.

Exactly what this is I'm not sure. The light configuration is not that of an airplane; airplanes have a red light on the left wingtip, green on the right wingtip and white in the back (tail section). That's not what I see here. By using the Heavens-Above and CalSky websites, there are a number of “satellites” it possibly could be. My first thought was an Iridium flare, but I don't think so. The next highest probabilities are rocket booster stages left in orbit, but that wouldn't explain the red light in the “center” of the to long “bars” of light. (The bars of light were lights that were on for a longer time in the exposure. The red light was on for a short time only, like a blink.) And is that a contrail or just where the object was light enough to leave that light trail (which is my guess)? And is the trail a true light that's on or reflection from the body of the spacecraft? Or is it an airplane with a different light configuration, military perhaps? I don't know. Have you got any ideas? Leave a comment.