It was the coldest night of the this winter so far, so I wasn't too keen on going outside and doing much star gazing. I did however setup my camera on the tripod and aimed to the Northeast in hopes of catching some Quadrantid meteors for a time-lapse on the night of January 3rd to the morning of January 4th. I left the camera out overnight and grabbed it first thing in the only about 30-40 minutes after sunrise. I was on my way to work so I didn't have time to review my pictures to see if I captured any meteors. All day at work I was curious about it and couldn't wait to get home to check it out. Unfortunately when I got home to view the pictures I was a bit disappointed that I got about two meteors one really faint upper left, the other quick and bright in the lower right, and a few airplanes.
I wasn't going to let the lack of meteors get me completely down. I decided to make the time-lapse anyway with the images I got, and it turned out quite good watching Ursa Major rise, and seeing Ursa Minor pop up from the bottom of the images while Polaris seems to hardly move at all in the video.
Best viewed in full screen and HD.
I also decided to make a star trail image from the same images used in the time-lapse video since it had recorded pictures every 30 seconds for roughly 10 hours. In this star trail image you can see how Polaris may be called the North Star, but it's <i>not quite</i> at the exact North Celestial Pole. Polaris is actually a little less than a degree off from <i>true</i> north.
Click to Enlarge.
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