Starship Asterisk*

Little Planet Astro Camp

Explanation: Day and night on this little planet look a lot like day and night on planet Earth. In fact, the images used to construct the little planet projection, a digitally warped and stitched mosaic covering 360x180 degrees, were taken during day and night near Tarján, Hungary, planet Earth. They span a successful 33-hour-long photo experiment at July's Hungarian Astronomical Association Astro Camp. The time-series composite follows the solar disk in 20 minute intervals from sunrise to sunset and over six hours of star trails in the northern night sky centered on the North Celestial Pole near bright star Polaris. The orbiting International Space Station traced the offset arc across the northern night. Below the little planet's nightside horizon, red light lamps of fellow astro-campers left the night-long, dancing trails.

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I think today's APOD is a delightful picture. And I believe the ancients would have loved it, since they used to think of the universe as a complicated set of clockworks.

Ann

Ann wrote:

Click to view full size image

Pearl earring clockworks by roddh.

I think today's APOD is a delightful picture. And I believe the ancients would have loved it, since they used to think of the universe as a complicated set of clockworks.

Ann

And everything in the picture is so round...
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I am sure it wins awards.... but not a real fan....
Glad they had fun...

Got my Meade 6" ETX LS SC scope Thurday...hope to use it if the weather clears on Friday. Will setup any pics in the proper forum place...
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what are the circle shape small white dots?

Wonderfully creative. The subject opened the door for a tremendous amount of questions and education. Three cheers for astro camp!

nedaroudbari wrote:what are the circle shape small white dots?

APOD Robot wrote:... The time-series composite follows the solar disk in 20 minute intervals from sunrise to sunset ...

So, there was a series of images during the day, all underexposed except for the one at noon (solar noon?), all with the camera in the same spot and facing straight south, and these were superimposed and projected on the upper half of the image. Then at night, the camera was just swung around to face north, and a lot more exposures were taken so that the star points almost look like tracks, but you can see the individual images not quite continuous (I like that choice!).

Nice planning to catch the ISS, I guess it truly did a "track" in just one or two of the exposures. An interesting thing is the star tracks near the horizon that do not circle the north pole. The line that divides between the tracks that circle the north pole and those that do not, does that correspond to the celestial equator? And the projection of a 180 degree view certainly messes with things ... the ISS track, for example, was probably a lot straighter in the sky, not much of an arc.

I've probably got some things wrong ... like NCTom said, describing the whole composition in detail sounds like a great learning opportunity.

This would probably be more appropriate in a photography journal than in an astronomy forum, star trails and solar track aside.

Interesting picture, interesting discussion, and, yes, quite appropriate for this site. It's an astronomy picture. A bit different than close-ups of celestial objects, but I for one welcome seeing it and learning from it.

And thanks MarkBour for explaining the methodology of acquiring this photo. I was wondering who makes a 180/360 lens and where the tripod legs were. Did they levitate the camera? Well, flip the camera and stitch together a composite. Duh!