Pleiades Constellation

With a serendipitous meteor in the frame

One of my Christmas presents was an inexpensive tracking (astronomy) mount. We finally had some clear nights, so I have been learning how to use it. (Never mind that I used to do this for a living; back then, on million-dollar telescopes, things like tracking the moving stars was something that just worked!)

In this case, I have to align the mount to the celestial pole (near Polaris; the point around which the sky appears to rotate in the northern hemisphere). That’s always fun - half bent over, squinting at a tiny poorly projected image of the desired position…I will leave that out of it for now.

I finally started getting a decent polar alignment on my third or fourth night out, and the shot above was one of the first ‘good ones’. The stars are round—pinpoints, actually; the Fuji 20-35mm lens is dead sharp. That’s good!

This is a 30-second exposure with the lens wide open at f/4. Focal length is on the wide side of the lens’s range, about 21mm.

The stars are so pin-point that they don’t actually show up all that well, although I’ve tried to brighten the image a bit to make them stand out at least a little. But they look quite dim, sadly, due to the image compression. The Pleiades itself is a little cluster of stars just above the image center. Zoom in to see what’s really there.