Urania

One of the neat internal websites you are seeing more and more of at observatories is the use of all-sky cameras to monitor cloud cover. You spend your time in a windowless control room (so as not to let light out) so sometimes you completely miss changes in weather. I downloaded the last roughly 10 hours of video from the all-sky camera here at CTIO and am posting a Flash movie version of it. It starts off with the crescent moon setting (which is bright enough to overwhelm the camera). Then you see the center of the Milky Way galaxy rising in the East, eventually getting very high in the sky.

Since each exposure is 10 seconds, in some frames you see ‘lines’ appear, these are typically airplanes or possibly satellites.

The bright “star” to the East (left) of the Galactic Center in the last few frames is the planet Jupiter. Also in the last few frames you start seeing a glow in the eastern sky, almost pointing toward Jupiter. This is the Zodiacal light, sunlight reflecting off dust particles in the plane of the solar system. You need quite dark skies to see that.