Swirls

I’m pretty sure Mr A is tired of my star gazing shenanigans, so with him being away, last night/this morning was a great opportunity for me to set up the camera (and myself) in the garden.

As any fellow Northwest sky watchers will know, we get a pretty bum deal when it comes to weather. I reckon the whole of the UK’s cloud system gathers directly over our region.

According to my ‘guru’ over on Twitter (@virtualastro if anyone is interested); there was a 3.06am pass of the latest batch of Starlink satellites. Newly released, they travel in a group, known as the ‘string of pearls’ and I’ve been desperate (and determined) to see these since I first heard about the Starlink programme back in the early days of lockdown.

When my alarm went off at 2:50am, I really didn’t want to get up, but the thought of missing the pearls on such a clear night helped me haul ass out of bed!

Temperature wise was perfect, and just a few clouds wisping by, so perfect conditions. From experience, I know things don’t always run to time with space hardware, so I gave myself a good 30 minutes to watch the skies.
I saw nothing.

Actually, I did see a spectacular Perseid meteor, but it was out of shot of my camera. Tut.

I use the Nightcap app on my phone for anything sky related, so set up a long exposure before I went to bed at 11pm. This photo is around 4 hours duration.
I couldn’t actually see anything on the original image, but adding a HDR filter on Snapseed revealed all those lovely star swirls but no string of pearls :-(

DQ x