Daniel H. Bennett was born in London in 1965 and lived in England until moving to the United States in 2000, settling in Northern Colorado.
Two nights ago I took a photo of the star Arcturus, using my Canon 70D camera with a 200mm zoom. The exposure time was 1.0 second, during which time I hand-held the camera and moved it during the shot. Here's the result.
The trace shows a massive number of variations (over 800!) of brightness and color. This is scintillation, better known as twinkling. Our eyes aren't able to see all these variations because (a) they're too dim, so we don't see the colors, and (b) they're too fast, so we see only the largest and slowest variations in brightness as twinkles.
The cause of these variations is atmospheric - the star itself is NOT twinkling! If you took a photo like this from the International Space Station, it would be a constantly bright, slightly orange line with no variations in color or brightness.
This type of photography is really easy... go try it!
