The Trails of North Pole in Lisbon Planetarium

Nowadays we can listen many talks around the word “startrails” and today, we can see thousands of pictures of startrails made in many different latitudes of the planet, facing to East, West, South and around the Polar Star, but have you ever thought how it would be a startrail captured from the North Pole? This kind of startrail is less often.

The height of the Polaris star varies with the latitude of each location. In Portugal for example, in average, the polar star is near 40 ° above the horizon, but at the North Pole, the Polaris is at the Zenith (90º), the point just above our heads, which makes – in a long photo exposure – that the track of each star near the horizon, is it shown as a parallel line, where those star never sets. But to realize this, nothing better than to see this long exposure of 25 seconds captured inside the 21 meters dome of our Lisbon Planetarium, Portugal, during a session where it simulates the rotation of Earth in the North Pole.

Canon 50D – ISO1250; Exp. 25 secs. f/4 at 10mm. In 17/05/2014 at 13:49.