Third place in the 2022 IAU OAE Astrophotography Contest, category Time lapses of celestial patterns

Subscribers:
640
Published on ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh2cxC9jWgE



Duration: 2:35
73 views
2


Third place in the 2022 IAU OAE Astrophotography Contest, category Time lapses of celestial patterns: Constellations from the World, by Ziyi Stephanie Ye

This video tries to cover a huge variety of phenomena in the night sky from different locations — Iceland and China — and is designed like a theatre play, starring mother nature herself.

It starts with a blue twilight sky that dims and unveils the starry night sky on the stage with terrestrial clouds on a beautiful landscape. The impressive parts of the southern Milky Way between Scorpius and Crux, with the Pointer Stars (Alpha and Beta Centaurus), are shown passing by majestically. The terrestrial clouds blur the stars and allow us to recognize their colours even more clearly.

The first act presents the starry sky in human culture. One scene shows the Pleiades rising over the top of a hill, while a human moves hastily with a flashlight below. At the very moment that Pleiades rises behind the hill, the beam of the flashlight hits the camera. There is some humour in this remarkable scene referencing the human relationship to the rise of Pleiades in cultural history.

The next scene shows The Big Dipper, Ursa Major, as a typical northern constellation, with an arch of aurora below it. The aurora evolves and moves but does not change much fundamentally. In northern human cultures, aurorae were often interpreted as the ghosts of ancestors, but this play does not spend any time on human beliefs, instead moving the view southwards in the subsequent scenes. First we see some stars rising shortly before sunrise. The lightcone of zodiacal light appears in Gemini/Taurus and the horizon gets brighter. In the next scene, at about 1 minute and 13 seconds, we see Orion setting over water, so that the water surface mirrors the celestial scene. Some clouds crossing the image prove that the videos were really taken on our beautiful planet, and, since Orion’s shoulder and foot are seen to set almost simultaneously, this sequence must have been captured almost at the equator. In this area, the bright stars of Orion look like a huge butterfly, with Orion’s Belt forming the body, and the quadrilateral of four bright stars interpreted as the wings.

Like in a real theatre, we now see a curtain before the next act of the heavenly play: an aurora curtain. The next act presents several bright stars in original scenes: the Chinese asterisms of The Tail (of the Azure Dragon), the Winnowing Basket and the Southern Dipper, which are seen in the modern constellations Scorpius and Sagittarius. The striking shape of Corona Borealis that has been recognized as an asterism in many cultures all over the globe, is also shown, as are some planets, the stars Vega and Deneb with adjacent areas, Altair, the Milky Way, and the characteristic “W” shape of Cassiopeia that has also been an asterism for many cultures on Earth.

The outro presents two more scenes with a smooth and silent night sky.

This video is available for download on: https://astro4edu.org/resources/media/YS92O57Yo90/

And on Zenodo repository: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7425668

Use freely under Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0 with attribution "Ziyi Stephanie Ye/IAU OAE" and license information.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode

Credit: Ziyi Stephanie Ye/IAU OAE




Other Videos By IAU Office of Astronomy for Education


2023-02-07Space Scoop: Florian Seitz at the OAE’s 4th Shaw-IAU Workshop
2023-02-07Incorporating Astronomy Research Into the Classroom: Fraser Lewis at the OAE’s 4th Shaw-IAU Workshop
2023-02-07Contemporary Topics, Innovative Classrooms: Jockie Bondell at the OAE’s 4th Shaw-IAU Workshop
2023-02-07The Dutch Black Hole Consortium Education Programme: Joanna Holt at the OAE’s 4th Shaw-IAU Workshop
2023-02-07Design-Based Research in Astronomy Education: Magdalena Kersting at the OAE’s 4th Shaw-IAU Workshop
2023-02-07Engaging Students and Teachers: Martin Hendry at the OAE’s 4th Shaw-IAU Workshop
2023-02-07Bringing Gravitational Waves into the Classroom: Sumeet Kulkarni at the OAE’s 4th Shaw-IAU Workshop
2023-02-07Meet the IAU Astronomers!: Suzana Filipecki at the OAE’s 4th Shaw-IAU Workshop
2023-02-06Embedding Astrophysics Within the High School: Martin Hendry at the OAE’s 4th Shaw-IAU Workshop
2022-12-15Honourable mention in the 2022 IAU OAE Astrophotography Contest: The Culmination of Canopus
2022-12-15Third place in the 2022 IAU OAE Astrophotography Contest, category Time lapses of celestial patterns
2022-12-15Second place in the 2022 IAU OAE Astrophotography Contest, category Time lapses of celestial pattern
2022-12-15First place in the 2022 IAU OAE Astrophotography Contest, category Time lapses of celestial patterns
2022-12-08China Astronomy Education Forum
2022-07-28OAE Center Italy Lampedusa STEAM-Med Workshop on Astronomy Education 2022
2021-12-162021 IAU OAE Astrophotography Contest, category Aurorae (time-lapses), First Place
2021-12-162021 IAU OAE Astrophotography Contest, category Aurorae (time-lapses), Second Place
2021-12-162021 IAU OAE Astrophotography Contest, category Aurorae (time-lapses), Third Place
2021-12-162021 IAU OAE Astrophotography Contest, category Galilean moons, First Place
2021-12-162021 IAU OAE Astrophotography Contest, category Galilean moons, Second Place
2021-12-162021 IAU OAE Astrophotography Contest, category Galilean moons, Third Place