Photo submitted by Peter McHugh.

My backyard view of the northern sky somewhere around 10:00 pm a week ago. I’ve marked the constellations and the pole star. I cropped out the house which was on right near the top. Image is 1.7 Megs. I know there is noise; I made no effort to remove it, but it still looks pretty good. It’s not too hard to visualize or imagine where Andromeda is and roughly when it will emerge in the north eastern morning sky – am I wrong?

The image is a very short focal length (14 mm / 28 mm equivalent in 35 mm format ) the stars would probably get lost if the image were to be reduced in size and resolution for our site. If you look closely at the stars nearer the end of the handle of the Big Dipper I have a problem (they are twinned – I can’t account for this; the shot was not perfectly tracked, but that wouldn’t cause the twinning). The effect extends down into the image a little and gradually disappears. Oh well.

Corrections were confined to exposure, curves, gamma, saturation, and gradient filter to reduce the bright glare from the city. My vantage is from the Hamilton Central Mountain area.

Note the very faint aircraft trail through the cup of the little dipper (roughly horizontal). You’ll have to really zoom in to see it.