This is 2-shot stitch taken from Keota Colorado, 65 miles east of Ft. Collins, taken on August 6, 2010. Very dark skies, warm night, no wind,Wide Field Milky Way Southern Summer Sky From Keota, Colorado
August 2010
These
are images of the Southern Summer Sky showing star clusters, nebulae and
even a star cloud in the Milky Way, Sagittarius on the left,
Ophichus/Milky Way
in the middle and Scorpio on the right). The smudge at the left is the
Comet McNaught C2009 R1. At the bottom, the
squiggly red line
takes you to Gary's 12 foot ladder and some of my other friends telescope
setups. Above the ladder is the light pollution dome
of Ft. Lupton's,
some 70 miles distant. And to the right on the horizon, is the red
taillight of a vehicle on Hwy.14, three miles south.
Temp-
~55*F
Wind-
0-3 mph
Humidity-
Very low
Transparency-
7/10
Seeing-
6.5/10
Camera-
Pentax MX SLR
Film-
Kodak Gold ASA 400
Exposure
time- 07 minutes
Platform-
C-14 w/ Losmandy CG-11Tripod/mount ........
There were
also a couple of scratches either from the processing or camera, which
I removed with Photoshop (yeah, I know that's cheating).
The dotted
streak is a high flying trans-continental jet and I had to do a 'black
hat trick' to obscure it. The yellow streak at bottom right is:
ATLAS CENTAUR 2,
Fri Aug. 06,10 @22:39 00m20s 14 11 above SW 14 above SW. Friends
have setup their telescopes in the foreground
and use only red
lights, which are 'THE LAW' during a star party.
To find out
what the long bright yellow streak at the bottom was, considering time,location
and magnitude, I ran a satellite scan HERE:
and the best candidate
was: ATLAS CENTAUR 2 Fri Aug. 06,10@22:39 00m20s 14*
max elevation at S, 11* above SW.
Candidates
from the generated list:
IRIDIUM 55 [+] Fri
Aug 06,10@22:18 00m20s 11 10 above WSW 11 above WSW
SL-16 R/B Fri Aug
06,10@22:27 01m00s 13 10 above WSW 13 above WSW
SL-3 R/B Fri Aug
06,10@21:18 01m00s 14 10 above SW 14 above SW
ATLAS CENTAUR 2
Fri Aug 06,10@22:39 00m20s 14 11 above SW 14 above SW
SoapBox:
If there isn't a reversal in the trend of the encroaching Light Pollution,
we have no more than 10 more years before we run out of dark
sky space between
Ft. Collins and Sterling. We are now at, Keota and it is 6 miles closer
to Sterling than Ft. Collins. Morn for the loss of the stars.