Snapshot Serengeti Talk

Moon, 4 stars and 1 small animal?

  • bjmendius by bjmendius

    The low right white dot seems to be in the grass: an eye? The other dots seem above the horizon; are stars bright enough to be on these pics and is the large irregular dot the moon?

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  • bjmendius by bjmendius

    Oops, I forgot, the image is ASG000bk8s

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  • ajg by ajg

    When I lighten it in Photoshop, those 4 dots are above the horizon. When I get home I'll see if I can match the date/time to a view in Starry Night (I'm an astronomy educator/amateur).

    I'm 98% sure that's not the Moon, but a bug caught in the flash.

    More tonight!

    Adrienne

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  • ajg by ajg

    OK - so I did some investigating...first in Starry Night for that night/rough location and time. I thought maybe the two bright on the right were Venus and Jupiter and that the camera was off 3 days (to make it match).

    I couldn't line it up with the 2 bright on the right. There's just nothing in the sky that would be bright enough to be caught in the exposure unless they were Jupiter/Venus.

    So then I perused the images before/after (by changing the URL/last letter) and find a bunch from the 13th around the same time...with NOTHING showing.

    Then I found one from a few minutes earlier. Lots fluff/bugs in the air. No Jupiter/Venus pair...there should have been.

    So I think in this photo it's all just bugs getting caught in the flash.

    This is the same night at 8:14pm:
    enter image description here

    And this is the one from 8:17pm
    enter image description here

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  • dms246 by dms246 moderator

    After seeing those other images you dug up, ajg, I just had another thought - it could be raindrops, from very light rain falling. They can look like different sized blobs and points of light like these ones.

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  • ajg by ajg

    ah yes! rain too --- Just not stars/planets 😃

    Adrienne

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  • bjmendius by bjmendius

    Thank you so much, ajg, for your research looking at other images from around the same time. I'm glad to learn of the bug and rain (thank you dms246) explanations, because I wasn't able to see an animal body, and all I could think of was celestial objects! My imagination was working overtime 😉

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