Panorama Photo

It doesn’t happen often but sometimes NLC’s remain visible throughout the night at our latitude. I shot this pano on June 28th, at 1:10 our time (23:10 UTC) when the sun was about 30 minutes before its deepest point below the horizon. They were only 1° to 3° above the horizon and very faint but still visible to the naked eye. I used camera settings for capturing stars i.e. a fairly long exposure. According to Heinz Hora’s calculations on my previous panorama and my UDeuschle simulation, these NLC’s should be located near the Stavanger coastline of Norway, so about 700 -800 km from here.

So here we have NLC’s exactly in the north and accompanied with the constellations: Lynx, Auriga, Perseus, Triangulum, Andromeda and Pegasus. I think the brightest part, top left of the lights of city of Goes, is where the sun is located behind the horizon similar to the column of light on clouds just after sunset.

Perseus is a nice constellation with a string of quite bright stars among which Mirfak (Alpha Persei), a yellow-white supergiant. Algol is a double star: an orange giant and a blue dwarf that accumulates matter from the first.

Andromeda (daughter of Cassiopeia) is a big constellation and shares Alpheratz with Pegasus (the Horse). Alpheratz is Andromeda’s alpha star (Alpha Andromedae) but Pegasus delta (Delta Pegasi).
If you look closely, you can even recognize the core of the Andromeda galaxy: the blurry spot, bottom left the A. That spot is at a distance of about 2 million light years and is of course the farthest object on this pano. It is our destination because the Milky Way is going to collide with Andromeda in about 2 bn years.

Canon Eos M6 with EF-M 11-22 mm, 7 p RAW, 18 mm (28.8 mm KB), iso 640, f 5.6, 13 s, 4400 °K, PTGuiPro, 8859x3346 119.4 MB TIFF, cropped to h=2470, downsized>1500>1000>500 TIFF> sharpened>1794x500 495 KB JPEG