Eternal Stars

[halcyon_garden]

The weather is still unchanged, around freezing and with very clear skies. Again I looked at the evening sky for as long as I could stand the cold. This time I tried taking more pictures of the stars. Handheld phone cam pictures will never be great astrophotography, but I'm pleased by how much does show up in these shots. I added screenshots from the free online app Stellarium for comparison, so it's easier to see the constellations.





The following pic has a lot going on, you might have to open the full image to see it well enough:
🪐Mars in ✨Gemini, all of the main stars of the constellation show up on the photo if you look closely. The brightest objects are ☀️Pollux, 🌟Castor and 🌟Alhena (one of the feet of the twin Pollux).
✨Auriga, which is shaped roughly like a squashed hexagon, consisting of mostly fairly bright stars. The brightest objects are 🌟Capella (which means "little goat", how cute!) and 🌟Menkalinan. ☀️Elnath kind of belongs to both ✨Auriga and ✨Taurus.
🪐Jupiter in ✨Taurus, again I am surprised how much showed up in my picture, all of the little head stars are there. ☀️Aldebaran is the bright eye. The horn tips are the above mentioned ☀️Elnath, and 🌟Zeta Tauri.
And then there's ✨Orion, with the very bright stars on his torso. The faint stars in the arm on the left (holding a weapon) are all visible, while the arm on the right (holding a shield or hide) has a couple super faint ones that don't show up in my pic.





I also attempted to take a pic of my fav ✨Cygnus. I already raved about it in yesterday's post. All of the main stars show up well enough here.
The picture also has ✨Lyra in it, with all main stars visible, the very bright one being ☀️Vega.





I stayed out long enough for some of the glory of the milky way to show up, and it was all very beautiful.

🪐 = Planet
☀️ = Star
🌟 = Multiple star system
✨ = Constellation/asterism