Summer Hill and Vincentia, NSW -- January 2023
Vincentia timelapse from Liz and John's deck, looking east, January 23-24 2023. Beautiful dark skies.
Lots happening here at Vincentia, NSW. Mercury is just rising out of the sea at the bottom of the image (that's a lighthouse in bottom left) while above it the Milky Way fills the sky (there are some wispy clouds above and to the left of the Milky Way, and it's hard to see where one begins and the other ends). The International Space Station flashes by on the left, catching the sun before dawn from its place high up in orbit. Antares is the brightest star in sinuous Scorpius.
A probable meteor burns up in the sky above Vincentia, NSW. The bright star Spica presides.
A probable meteor, most likely a speck of dust, burns up in the sky above Vincentia, NSW.
In Summer Hill. Meteor or satellite? It's sometimes hard to tell, as in this startrails image for the night of January 14-15, 2023. At top center a short, bright trail appears in only one frame, at 4:26am. It's not an airplane (compare to the flashing-lights trail to its left, or the very bright long trail at bottom center) or a star (the curving parallel trails all over the image, including trails left by the Southern Cross and Alpha and Beta Centauri in the tree to the right), or the Moon (the *very* bright trail across the bottom left corner). Satellites otherwise too dim to appear in the images will sometimes catch the sun just right (the sun is below our horizon, but not the satellite's) and suddenly "flare" brightly. This one is very regular and symmetrical, so it's most likely a satellite flare, but no obvious satellite candidate was in that part of the sky at that moment, so it *could* be a meteor burning up in the atmosphere, maybe only a speck of dust that didn't have enough mass to break into bits before vaporizing.
Here's the single image the possible meteor appears in.
The Summer Hill night of Jan 9-10 was beautifully clear, and yielded this nice startrails image. The Southern Cross and Alpha and Beta Centauri are the bright trails in the tree to the right. That's Sirius in the tree to the left, and the trail next to it, at a different angle, is an aircraft passing over at 3:52am.
The Southern Cross peeks through leaves in the backyard.
Followed a few minutes later by Alpha Centauri, and Beta Centauri above it.
The Camera
