Photos

Since I had my camera out the other night to capture the eclipse, I thought I'd see what else I could do. So I turned my 300mm lens on the Pleiades star cluster. It's also known as the Seven Sisters, because under good conditions, a person with normal eyesight can make out seven stars. But as you can see here, there are far more than that - the faintest stars here are about 8th Magnitude, whereas the Mark I eyeball only works down to Mag 6.

The reason they don't appear as points is that in the 10 seconds it took to expose the sensor, the Earth rotated enough to smear out the images into the tracks you see. So don't tell me that this photograph doesn't belong in TE - it does teach you something about our planet!

I think it's also interesting to notice the different colours of the stars - something that's not so easy to see with the naked eye.

Finally, you'll notice that the background sky isn't quite black. This is simply light pollution - I took this from outside my home in Ipswich, and the reddish glow is from the sodium streetlights.

We now return you from this Star Trek special to your normal Trek Earth service!