Starship Asterisk*

Was anyone able to see a brightness gradient on last night’s eclipse? I couldn’t.

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Northern lights over the Lago di Lugano
...Located in the Italian-speaking south (Ticino) of Switzerland. ...or holiday greetings from the boathouse last night (10.05.2024 - 23:30 MEZ) jac berne (flickr)

Last night I tried to photograph the aurora with my DSLR with little success. My wife took these with her IPhone. With my eye it was not very apparent but her cell phone captured quite a different scene.

Is aurora photography with a basic Canon that different a task

Fred the Cat wrote: ↑Mon May 13, 2024 3:18 am Last night I tried to photograph the aurora with my DSLR with little success. My wife took these with her IPhone.
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With my eye it was not very apparent but her cell phone captured quite a different scene.

Is aurora photography with a basic Canon that different a task

I would expect any reasonably modern DSLR, mounted on a tripod and with appropriate manual settings, to outperform any phone camera for aurora photography.

Last night I spotted a magnificent... stick figure! If ever you show people the Double Cluster in Perseus with its many supergiants and they're not too impressed, just say "Go left and you can always look at a stick figure instead!". Fun for kids too. - Seriously though, it really is a pretty sight, the "sticks" contain lots of stars. Stellarium

Christian G. wrote: ↑Tue Oct 29, 2024 1:07 pm Last night I spotted a magnificent... stick figure! If ever you show people the Double Cluster in Perseus with its many supergiants and they're not too impressed, just say "Go left and you can always look at a stick figure instead!". Fun for kids too. - Seriously though, it really is a pretty sight, the "sticks" contain lots of stars.
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Stellarium

Looks like you spotted the cluster Stock 2! It sure looks fun and impressive!

Ann

Ann wrote: ↑Wed Oct 30, 2024 5:14 pm Looks like you spotted the cluster Stock 2! It sure looks fun and impressive!

Ann

Glad to learn this, thank you! I've now googled it and it just gets funnier, what I saw as a stick figure is nicknamed the Muscleman cluster!

I have also dwelled a lot these days in this area of Cygnus, so glorious it justifies getting the right binoculars just to see it alone! In the circle on top you see something like a hook or a musical F clef starting with Sadr, and your eyes spontaneously make out a mirror shape with the stars on the other side such that the whole thing looks like a big stellar heart! With bright Sadr majestically in the middle, superb!

And then you move to the lower left oval, which impresses me even more! Two gorgeous and unmissable arches of stars facing one another in an otherwise shapeless field of countless stars, it's a sight that would get anyone hooked!

Oh and, between the two circled areas, you get to see a luminous blue variable, a Wolf-Rayet and a carbon star all in the same field of view! How often does this happen? And if you want, those pretty arches too let you see four more WRs, one of which is an optical double with a blue supergiant, I mean, it's a super star wonderland up there! Stellarium
(image far from doing justice to the starry glitters and sparkles of the real thing…)

I was able to see Uranus and Neptune for the first time through my Dobson telescope. I was really, I have never thought that one day I will be able to look at all the planets with my own eyes.