Post
by whitestone » Wed Mar 04, 2020 11:04 am
I think it's the plane's navigation lights Sean, they blink so would appear as a series of dots. In some of the other shots there's a plane going away from me and the trace appears as a line but if you zoom in you can see it's really a sequence of flashes of light. Unless the Starlink satellites rotate then they'd appear as a straight line. Also I took the shots at 2130 so the sun would be well below the horizon (by about 50degs) so unlikely to be lighting up low earth satellites.
Constellation? It's the Plough, Ursa Major. Follow the plane "dots' and you come to a pair of brighter stars almost in the centre of the shot - those are the two stars away from the plough's handle, the constellation is hanging down from those. Polaris is the bright star just inward of the left hand edge of the shot. Something I've noticed with starscapes is that they reveal an awful lot more stars than we are accustomed to using the naked eye so picking out the constellations becomes hard work.
For a compact camera (Sony rx100) and my first attempt they aren't that bad. Exposure was about 15 seconds at f2.0 and ISO 6400. At least with digital you can play around with things and experiment quickly.
Better weight than wisdom, a traveller cannot carry