I have just photographed the “Summer Triangle” from my driveway, using my Canon DSLR camera. The three stars are low in the East, so we can rejoice.. summer has arrived!
Summer Triangle Of Stars (click for larger)
The “Summer Triangle” is a startling asterism of three bright stars. Even non-astronomers notice this prominent triangle pattern, during the Northern hemisphere summer.
The star pattern is made more noticeable by the generally light sky at this time of year (it doesn’t get properly “nautical” dark, if you are more than about 52 degrees of latitude North.
I have enhanced the image below, by drawing the “triangle sides”. Hopefully, this will help you to spot the Summer Triangle, when you look up at this time of year. (Ignore the aeroplane trail!)
Enjoy the summer!
Summer Triangle of Deneb, Vega, Altair (click for larger)
The stars are Deneb in the constellation of Cygnus, Vega in Lyra and Altair in Aquila.
The image on the right shows Lulin close to the star Regulus, in the constellation of Leo.
Between them is an orange ”streak”. I’m not sure exactly what it was, probably an aircraft. But it’s interesting.
(PS. It has since been pointed out… if you look carefully, you can see the periodically flashing white and double-red lights, of a high-flying aircraft)
The image was captured with my Canon 1000D dslr camera, through the ED80 600 mm focal length refractor.
It’s a single frame of 2 minute exposure at ISO 800.
I actually took about 15 frames with different exposure times. I shall try my hand at stacking some of the best, to see if I can produce better images after processing.
Here’s the best single frame shot of Lulin I have found, so far. It was a 3 minute exposure. You can see from the star shapes, there is some tracking error. I need to work on a better North alignment of the mount.
Occultation is the term use to describe when one object in Space, passes in front of another object and in doing so, obstructs our view of it.
We are familiar with occultations of the Sun and the Moon. We give these occultations a special name – eclipses – solar eclipse for the Sun and lunar eclipse for the Moon. read on..
