anirudhchandrakant

Let me get it out of the way - this is a terrible photo of the night sky. The aperture setting was disastrous and resulted in far fewer stars than were visible to the naked eye in the beautiful jungle sky.

This is also a very interesting photograph. Star gazing is fascinating but the human eye only sees stars in white. The long exposure of a camera not only captures star trails that show the revolution of earth, but also shows the colors of the various stars. In the scientific community, this was a pretty recent discovery since the equipment earlier was never good enough to capture color. 

The colors of the stars, as we now all know, provide a gauge to measure relative temperatures. The sun, as seen from space, is white in color. Any stars cooler than the sun are towards the red spectrum and stars hotter than the sun are towards the violet spectrum. Some of the hottest stars are over a million times hotter than the sun. Also, interestingly (albeit mere co-incidently) the hottest stars are generally the biggest ones. This classification of stars based on their spectral type is one of the most widely used types of classifications.

When i shot this, the Orion constellation was directly overhead. So, the blue star trail at the bottom right of the image could very well be Bellatrix, which is about 5 times as hot as the sun.

A much better image is what i am hoping for the next time around. However, star gazing is completely worthwhile even without images from a camera.