Central Park: Looking South 9-Nov

Southern View from TotL (detail)
Central Park South from the Great Lawn, New York City
Image by BEN CACACE

Click the picture above for a wide-angle view of Central Park South taken from our observing site.

The image is from the ‘Top of the Lawn’ where we do most of our Central Park observing. It was taken shortly before Charlie arrived and was inspired by the handheld panorama he took of the same scene.

Fomalhaut, the brightest star in the constellation Piscis Austrinus (Southern Fish), is visible in the photo in the extreme upper left hand corner. The view is looking south southwest down the spine of Manhattan. The center of the photo is roughly 210 degrees in azimuth.

The left edge of the image is just east of 180 degrees and the right is close to 240 degrees making the width of the image nearly 60 degrees.

The photo was taken at 7:49pm EST on the 9th of November. The exposure was 6 seconds at f/2.8. The focal length in 35mm equivalent was 38mm. The camera used is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ30.

At the time of the photo Fomalhaut was at azimuth 182.6 degrees and 19.6 degrees above the horizon. The brightest building in the center of the skyline is ‘30 Rockefeller Plaza’ home of ‘Saturday Night Live’ and is also known as the ‘G.E. Building’.

The star in the upper left corner, Fomalhaut (magnitude 1.2 — alpha Pisces Austrini), is in the Southern Fish constellation. When I look closely at the original 5.3 megapixel image I can see stars down to mag. 5.9 in the area around Fomalhaut including delta (m4.2), gamma (m4.5) & epsilon (4.2) Piscis Austrini plus the 5.9 mag star HIP 114366 (not shown).

The image above is a slightly compressed from the original showing the stars visible around Fomalhaut. The wide-angle view is one third the size of the original.