Iridium Flare Pair

[ravnostic]

These aren’t that uncommon to see, if you know where to look for them ( heavens-above.com can find them for you) but I’d never seen two in the same place on the same night just 4 minutes apart. Thought it was pretty spiffy. It’s a big image (only 1/16th the area of full res, but still), so I hope the G+ link will take you there:

https://plus.google.com/photos/107857888121727893520/albums/5788969753419991201/5788969757194017538

These are pretty easy to get, ya’ll ought to be trying for these! 😛

[chupathingie]

oh sweet! I hardly thought anyone even knew about these!

Wanna freak someone out? take them outside and say “look over here…” just before a flare happens.

Nice catch, rav.

[ravnostic]

Here’s another, of a different kind. I knew _where_ they were, mostly; it was just a matter of settings and exposure etc. to catch a good shot of them. Canon 50mm~f1.8, but set to f/4 and equiv to 85mm, 3.2 sec. exposure (can’t have star trails you know), 15 stacked lights against 24 darks, and after more than 2 hours sleuthing and verifying, I bring you minor planets Ceres and Vesta, conveniently labeled, from last night on a break from work. I think the inner-city pollution worked for me on this one; they’re 2.25-2.5x the distance of the sun, about 7.8-8.5 magnitude, and if I had all the stars available in the darkest skies, I’d probably never be able to identify them. As it is, I’ll take shots tonight; they should have moved enough to know I picked correctly (but I have 98% confidence I did).

[chupathingie]

That’s cool… I’ve never tried to get shots of asteroids. Thought about composing the 2 nights’ shoots into an animated gif as sort of a blink/compare?

[ravnostic]

Planning on it, chupa; will be back at it tonight. Should be much easier than spotting/verifying just a single image!!

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