Kent UK - Bright squiggly line in photo of night sky [The star Vega + partial camera shake]

[FatPhil]

The black stuff in the picture that surrounds the white dots and the white line was not actually there in the sky, it was added by the camera software on your phone. Possible culprits are the compression algorithm (these often introduce noticeable artifacts along edges) or the digital zoom (it adds pixels based on guesswork) or possibly "AI" on modern phones.

When the artefact has ringing that seems to follow the shape of a high-contrast edge, it's usually an "unsharp mask" filter that's being used to make the image sharper.

It a seemingly silly name for a filter, but there's some history behind it - you subtract a bit of a blurred (hence "unsharp") version of the image from the original; perhaps another parity-flip in the name to represent subtraction would have helped - in particular as the "subtraction" was, because this was analogue, addition of the negative.

 

[Mick West]

The bright star is Vega. Much brighter than the others so it makes sense for it to be the only one with a visible trail.

Lines up perfectly with all the visible stars.

 

[Obi]

View attachment 79857

Lines up perfectly with all the visible stars.

Nice skills

 

[Obi]

Nice skills

Update, looked at sky last night, tried to replicate got some photos, managed to create a vertical line. Nothing like the other one. Let's close the book on the thread. Thanks all