Flowing Night Sky

Honourable mention in the 2022 IAU OAE Astrophotography Contest, category Time lapses of celestial patterns.

This time-lapse was shot from Slovakia in August 2020. By fixing the relative movement of the sky to Earth's rotation in some of the frames, we can experience a different perspective as a viewer.

The Milky Way, our home galaxy, is visible throughout the whole video. The bright objects near the Milky Way are Jupiter and Saturn, close together, Jupiter being the brighter one.

This video also shows the interaction of amateur astronomers observing the Perseids meteor shower with their telescopes pointed towards the sky. An unfortunate aspect of the art of astronomical observing, clouds can suddenly cover the whole sky. The fog occurs mostly because of the higher humidity after the rain.

Most of the light trails in the sky are made by satellites, but some of them, appearing just very briefly and not very noticeably, are meteors, as the video was shot around the peak of Perseids meteor shower.

Credit: Robert Barsa/IAU OAE (CC BY 4.0)