This is just a quick post to share with you an image taken with the camera module on ‘night’ exposure mode. Bear in mind this was taken just before 5.30am in the UK so the night sky was already lightening towards sunrise and I’m pointing not much off horizon level. It gives me hope that the next time we have a clear night (and I remember to do it, *cough cough, embarrassed glance*) I’ll be able to go to a darkened area and take a decent photograph straight up. I’m also going to experiment with pointing the camera at the moon and adding a 50x magnification eyepiece (focus will be a challenge).

Douglas Burke commented on my previous timelapse photography post about possibly uploading night sky pictures to Astrometry.net. This is an interesting service which creates astrometric meta-data for every astronomical images. In other words, you upload a photo and they identify the celestial bodies that are present in the picture. They also allow you to download the source code for the project. So, I’m going to add this to my list for my SpacePi astronomy project – a) upload to Astrometry b) compile the code on the Pi and see if I can get the celestial identification being done on the Pi itself.

In the meantime, here’s that image (click to enlarge to full 5 megapixel splendour)!