Our cameras operate all night every night so they have plenty of opportunity to capture all sorts of odd events. The images below show a range of weird, surprising, interesting or just plain strange images that have been captured recently.
Terry created this art piece made up from several nights’ images merged together and coloured. It contains moth trails, water dripping off the guttering, the odd meteor, and satellites. Our images are monochrome. The green here is an artistic choice.
James Scott submitted this image from NZ002E, Letts Gully Observatory 2, Alexandra in June 2024.
It shows the typical partially suppressed star trails from stacking a night’s images along with a good collection of meteor trails and an exploding meteor. A major bonus feature are the sprites forming above thunderclouds in the bottom right of the image. The dotted trail in the bottom left is an aircraft and the solid trail above it is probably a bright satellite.
Steve Wyn-Harris submitted this image from NZ003C, Waipukurau in June 2024.
The weirdness in this image are the strange parallel tracks in the top left and partway down the image on the left. Jesse Stayte comments:
What Steve’s seen in his South-facing camera is the fully deployed Starlink constellation. They have panels textured and orientated to minimise reflection of the sun to the ground during most hours, but these ones are going throughout the middle of the night from low earth orbit (note this time-lapse starts later than usual), they must be reflecting the Moon, as also shown by its rate of tracking across the sky. We can look forward to many South-facing cameras catching this during bright moons, and indeed we regularly do.
For reference this is a rather nice capture of a fireball over the Hawkes Bay as imaged by camera NZ003S. This broke up high above the ocean on 11.15 pm on the 27th of July. It was however unusually slow at about 12km per second (70km per second is fairly normal).
For those of us with an astronomical bent this is how we like to see Starlink Satellites – re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere and burning up! The series of images making up this video was captured by the south facing camera NZ0003S in Gisborne at about 9:35pm on September 25, 2024.
Zooming the video window full screen and using the scroll bar will help see the action in detail. The small object rising in the lower right of the video in sync with the re-entry is most likely an internal reflection in the camera.
Usually clouds are the bane of the astronomical community, but our cameras see them and often generate really interesting images. This capture is from NZ002X showing the clouds coming off the Ruahine ranges North West of Waipukurau.