North Celestial Pole 2

 

 

  On Wednesday evening I captured several images of the North Celestial Pole like the one above. Each image was 4288 x 3216 and the exposure was 16 seconds with an F-Stop of 4.5. Six of the images taken about 8 minutes apart were merged and the ends of the arcs were used to calculate the pole using the formula for the rotational center. My results agreed fairly well with the J2000 position. The humidity was about 75% and there was some sky glow present. The brightest star near the center is Polaris.

 

 

  Supplemental (Nov 22): I've replaced the original merged image which used the sum of the pixel values of the image points with one that uses the greater of the two pixel values. There's a little more background noise but the pixel values are more representative of the observations. The images posted are one sixth the size of the originals. MS Paint was used to get the pixel coordinates for the data. The "+" marks the computed pole position.