{"id":41,"date":"2026-04-26T11:48:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-26T15:48:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/?p=41"},"modified":"2026-04-26T12:08:46","modified_gmt":"2026-04-26T16:08:46","slug":"the-stars-move","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/?p=41","title":{"rendered":"The stars move"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1294\" height=\"859\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/2023-04-03T02.42.30-edited.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-46\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/2023-04-03T02.42.30-edited.png 1294w, https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/2023-04-03T02.42.30-edited-300x199.png 300w, https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/2023-04-03T02.42.30-edited-1024x680.png 1024w, https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/2023-04-03T02.42.30-edited-768x510.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1294px) 100vw, 1294px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>I realized pretty quickly that the street light outside of the house in Toledo made it nearly impossible to capture an image of the stars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Luckily I was planning a move to Westerville OH where the nights were darker and I had some more space to find a good place away from lights. I did some research and found out that the really amazing pictures are taken with really long exposure times while mounted on an automated rotator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In case you didn\u2019t know, the Earth spins relative to the stars. Which means the stars appear to rise and set just like the sun and moon. A motorized mount can be used to counteract the Earth&#8217;s rotation. Providing stable, always in frame images of whatever you\u2019re trying to capture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1152\" height=\"2560\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20230304_174423-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-45\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20230304_174423-scaled.jpg 1152w, https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20230304_174423-135x300.jpg 135w, https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20230304_174423-461x1024.jpg 461w, https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20230304_174423-768x1707.jpg 768w, https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20230304_174423-691x1536.jpg 691w, https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20230304_174423-921x2048.jpg 921w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1152px) 100vw, 1152px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>So I acquired one! I bought a skyguider pro from iOptron.<br>This mount requires that I align the motor to point to the celestial pole. And in the Northern Hemisphere that&#8217;s as easy as finding the north star. Once I understood how to set this up, I was finally able to capture my first target, the Pleiades. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"774\" height=\"486\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/image.png\" alt=\"A single exposure of the Pleiades\" class=\"wp-image-43\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/image.png 774w, https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/image-300x188.png 300w, https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/image-768x482.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 774px) 100vw, 774px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>See how the trees are blurry, but the stars are sharp! There is even an airplane in this image, which shows that it&#8217;s a long exposure. I&#8217;m skipping some steps, like focusing and the settings on the camera, but these are covered in much better detail across the internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In case you didn\u2019t know, the Earth spins relative to the stars. Which means the stars appear to rise and set just like the sun and moon. A motorized mount can be used to counteract the Earth&#8217;s rotation. Providing stable, always in frame images of whatever you\u2019re trying to capture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":46,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions\/57"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/46"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillipcook.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}