Stars Move

Pictures recorded over 70 years by the same telescope show stars moving across the sky. Proper motion of the stars shows that the Sun and stars are moving through space. Seasonal parallactic motion shows that the Earth is moving around the Sun. The changes over years to decades are small but observable even to backyard telescopes. Wide-field images at the beginning and end of the video were taken with the Omea 8M all-sky camera at the Mount Laguna Observatory in San Diego County. Telescopic images were taken from the publicly available archives produced from the Oschin Schmidt telescope at Palomar Observatory in San Diego County including the first and second epochs of the Palomar Sky Survey (1950 & 1991), the Palomar Transient Factory (2012-2016), and the Zwicky Transient Facility (2018-2020). Dennis di Cicco’s observations were recorded in his backyard using an 11“ Celestron and a 16“ Meade. I have systematically shifted these points arc seconds West and arc seconds South. The star with the fastest proper motion is Barnard’s Star. According to Gaia, it was located at R.A., Dec. = , on J2015.5, and it is moving arcseconds West and arcseconds North each year with a parallax of arcseconds. Watch it move!