North Circumpolar Stars
A 10.6 MB QuickTime Movie: North Circumpolar Stars ©1994 by Charles Peirce
On Friday, August 20, 1982, I started a photography project with a 180 degree "fish eye" lens East of Yellowstone National Park. Located just North of U.S. 212, CLAY BUTTE LOOKOUT, provided a really dark location at
9811 feet elevation. The film used was Kodak's High Speed Ektachrome, ASA 400. The 35 mm slides were taken every ten minutes all night long to capture the movement of the stars around Polaris. The processing was done by Kodak
at ASA 800. A Minolta f/2.8 16mm fisheye lens was used on a Minolta SRT 101 camera body. Can you find the "shooting star" below?
Are you interested in the motion of the stars? Visit a planetarium: Abrams Planetarium.
Download 10.2 MB North Circumpolar Stars movie (10,240K) Stuffit Expander needed
(actual frame from the 10.6 MB QuickTime Movie described above)
August 20, 1982 after Sunset:
Exposure times:
slide #1 8:40 PM 1/30 second
slide #2 8:50 PM 1/4 second
slide #3 9:00 PM 1 second
slide #4 9:10 PM 2 seconds
slide #5 9:20 PM 10 seconds
slide #6 9:30 PM 20 seconds
slides #7 thru #20 1.5 minutes each (starts at 9:40 and ends with #20 at
11:50 PM)
August 21,1982 #21 = Midnight
slides #21 thru #50 10 minutes each (the best slides). I had
gotten tired of timing the exposures for 1.5 minutes each (already sleepy)
and decided to do the rest for 10 minutes each. All of them should have
been 10 minutes.
slide #51 5:00 AM 1.5 minutes
slide #52 5:10 AM 1.5 minutes
slide #53 5:20 AM 1.5 minutes
After midnight, all during the early morning hours of August 21, 1982, I
witnessed a violent thunderstorm move from the NW to the NE in the direction
of the Montana/Wyoming border. I thought that the large flashes of lightning
would wash out the bottom half of the slides, but only where the lightning
repeated several times, did it "burn in" the flashes on the 35
mm transparencies. I got to see Sirius "rise" in the early morning
sky before Sunrise just as the ancient Egyptians did 1000's of years ago
when such an event really was significant. In 1994, I sent the slides to
Kodak to convert them to a Photo CD-ROM. Then I converted them into a QuickTime
movie.
Published by the...
Physics and Chemistry Departments
Carson City-Crystal High School
Carson City, Michigan 48811
E-mail any questions to...
CEPeirce@aol.com
517 584 6312