The images in this post are going to reflect more of my casual shooting stance last night, and I apologize. I went out solely to see if I could capture something in the few minutes that it might be visible, and I did, but didn’t have my heart set on astrophotography and it shows.
Above, a crescent moon was showing notable earthshine on the ‘shadowed’ portion while I was out, so
I posted about this before, with my own feeble efforts in illustrating, but here’s a better version, courtesy of Bob King at Universe Today: Sirius, UFO trickster extraordinaire. It features a brief but very cool video.
Note also the image in there of Kenneth Arnold with the sketch of what he saw. In case the name is unfamiliar, Arnold is the guy who sparked the UFO ‘craze,’ and
So, what is it?
I’ve had this experiment in the back of my head for a while now, and tried it last night. What you’re seeing here is Sirius, otherwise known as the Dog Star or the Dog’s Nose, and the brightest star in the sky. As a quick aside, for some reason many people think Polaris, or the North Star, is supposed to be the brightest, which would be handy but is far from the