Last night I did some stargazing and used my iPhone to take pictures of the night sky. It was a clear night, and it is only a couple of days past the new moon, so conditions were pretty good. In preparation for a night such as this I had purchased a combination selfie stick and tripod. Using it as a tripod, I could take long exposures like the one pictured here. I ran this one for about twenty minutes, long enough to see the rotation of the stars as they circle around the north pole. You can plainly see where the pole is at the center of all these arcs. At first, I thought that the straight lines that crisscross the image were satellites, but then I figured out that they must be jets. There are two tells. In the lower left corner, there are several lines that are dotted. That must be caused by the plane’s blinking lights. Most puzzling though were the hooks at the lower end of the main lines that pass nearest to the pole. For a while, I thought that these lines were caused by orbiting satellites, but the artifact of the hooked lines puzzled me. Then I figured that the hooks were from when the aircraft turned, as they lined up on either San Francisco or LA.

Later, when we were getting ready for bed, we looked to the west, out of our bedroom window and saw Orion, then Tarus with its Pleiades and Jupiter too. The sky was very dark by then. Looking through binoculars, I could see the moons of Jupiter and Orion’s nebula. The low relative humidity out west here makes the stars look so clear. It was cold by then, but the spring peepers were out croaking. In conditions permit, maybe I can do this again tonight.