Quote History Originally Posted By jebsofnga: Thanks bpm !!!
What would cause these 2 stars to seem to be jumping around like that? Is there something
between us & them that causes the light to "bend" & make it look like they are moving?
IMO, it seems almost like these 2 objects are tethered weather balloons, but they follow the
same track every night like other stars.
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Atmospheric distortion, and they are hauling ass to the horizon. Betelgeuse is going to have one of the higher angular sweeps of any star out there, because it's roughly an East/West setting star. Capella, slightly less so.
The North Star, Polaris, is visible in each of these photos, as the star that is
roughly stationary - but you can see that it is sweeping out a very small circle, so not entirely stationary. Move away from this point, and you are looking more east or west and the star trails become progressively longer - because they are covering more sky in the same amount of time. Stars along the east/west plane will form straighter lines in these photographs.
In this photo you can see arcs in two directions. With an unbent line of stars running roughly into the pass just north of Grand Teton, and I'll bet that pass is pretty much due west. This is the Ansel Adams Overlook, so you can geolocate these features and get bearings.
The stars to the right are rotating counterclockwise around Polaris. The stars to the left are rotating clockwise around a point that is the would-be South Star, if there was one, a point well below our horizon.
And, the "North Star" isn't always the north star. When Columbus navigated his way over here, he did so shooting to a blank part of the sky where Polaris currently sits, today. I think Polaris was some 10 or 15º out from that position back then, maybe something like a full handwidth at arm's reach, or something like that.
Kind of funny that we give "the North Star" a latin-based name,
Polaris. I don't think it would have been the North Star back then, either, and probably not the most prominent star circling around the pole. We've made a transposition of a couple thousand years, here. I think.