Star

arcooke · Sep 12, 2008

I took a picture of something kind of cool last night and wanted to share it. Here's the story:

I was out back getting some air before bed, and there was a star twinkling more than I've ever seen a star twinkle. It was then red, then blue, then green, then yellow.. like a strobe light. I tried to get it in a video zoomed way in, but the twinkling didn't show up.

Just for grins, I set my camera's shutter to 1/3.2 and fired off a shot at full (18x) zoom. I was holding it by hand, so of course I knew it would have some motion blur.. but for once this actually worked in my favor. I was able to capture all the colors the star was twinkling in one photograph.

Not a great photo by any means.. I just thought this was really neat.

ArtPhotography · Sep 12, 2008

That is a very cool shot, but I would venture to guess that anything changing those particular colors is likely not a star (perhaps a plane). You must live in a city (like I do) because there are no other stars visible.

arcooke · Sep 12, 2008

It was definitely not a plane, I know the difference

I was outside for about 15 minutes and it didn't move. I often see stars blinking different colors.. this one just happened to be really pronounced.

And yes, I live in the city.. the night skies here are so boring.

photographyaddict · Sep 13, 2008

I'm a little confused. Do you mean that the star was just there in the one place, it wasn't falling but it was twinkling different colours?

paigegreen916 · Sep 14, 2008

can you post the image?

Solthar · Sep 14, 2008

That's actually pretty cool - never really noticed any stars doing that before. Maybe something to do with the higher than average levels of air pollutants in most cities?

Anyways, am I the only one guilty of thinking, "Looks like E.T. called home..." ? :lmao: