St. Mary's, Ross and the Prospect by night.

The night time photographs of St. Mary's, Ross-on-Wye and the Prospect below were taken between 7:00 and 9:00 pm on Sunday 9th February 2003. I have not reduced them in size quite as much as I normally would for this site in order that the stars remain visible. The captions below each photograph give any astronomical information that I am 100% aware of. I used a 30 second exposure at f.2 for each photograph, so the scenes actually appear brighter than in reality. (As anybody who has walked through the churchyard by night will be well aware!) Daytime photographs of St. Mary's can be seen here.

The west side of St. Mary's Parish Church, Ross-on-Wye with the planet, Saturn visible mid way up and to the right of the steeple. The stars
Pollux and Procyon are visible to the left of the tower. Pollux is the higher of the two, within the tree.

The south side of St. Mary's Parish Church, Ross-on-Wye with the constellation of Ursa Major (Great Bear), also known as the Plough ('Plow' or 'Big Dipper', if your native language is American) visible behind and to the right of the tree.

The west side of St. Mary's, Ross-on-Wye with the planet Jupiter visible to the left of the steeple and the red star Alpha Orionis (Betelgeuse) to the right.
Betelgeuse is a red super giant, a 'sun-like' star, larger than the orbit of Jupiter around our own sun but nearing the end of its life, which in astronomical
terms means it may only have a few million years left.

This treetop on the Prospect is lit by an overexposed half moon and a minute amount of reflected light from Wilton Road below. The horns of Taurus the Bull can be seen either side of the branch in about the 10 o'clock position of the photograph and the Pleiades cluster is visible at the top, slightly left of the moon.

A view of the north side of St. Mary's Parish Church, Ross with the bottom part of a halo surrounding
the moon visible above. I am unsure of the names of the few stars visible in this photograph.